Birthday Surprise

When I woke up this morning, I unlocked my smartphone, checked my email, and saw a flood of emails reminding me I was now a year older. *groan*

While the majority were from friends, there were also a bunch from a variety of businesses wishing me a happy birthday — not to mention including coupons and special offers in the message as well.

If you recall from a blog post last week, I'm not a huge fan of over-personalizing business emails with names and other info. In this case however... it works.

Don't be too personal when personalizing

Hi, {FIRST_NAME}! Hope you're enjoying this blog!

Personalization can be incredibly useful when sending out email blasts — chances are you may already have lots of information about your subscribers, and you may be tempted to insert all kinds of merge fields to make your message more appealing.

However...