How to Add Personality and Personalization Into Your Emails

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The inbox is a digital living room, a personal space that your readers graciously let you into. Like visiting someone at home, it’s best to show up being yourself but also bringing something that feels personal to your reader. They want to hear from you — but they still want the conversation to be relevant to them.  

That’s where personality and personalization come in.

• “Personality” is all about you and your voice — who you are, what you care about, and how you talk with your audience.
• “Personalization” is all about them — how you deliver relevant stories, topics, or conversations to your readers.

Take a look at your inbox, and you’ll see newsletters that leverage each strategy. Newsletters from independent writers and newsrooms often lean into personality. You’ll see their name listed before you open the email and their byline inside. Even newsletters that don’t have a specific writer behind them, like TheSkimm, still have a consistent voice and tone with every send.

And on the other end are fully-personalized newsletters. You’ll see a lot of this strategy in emails from big brands trying to sell you stuff. It’s the airline showing deals from your nearby airport, the ecommerce brand highlighting clothing in your exact size, or the streaming service nudging you about a new show featuring your favorite actor. You’ll also see it in the political or non-profit space — maybe it’s a newsletter from a local charity nudging you to volunteer at an event happening in your area.

These two forces, personality and personalization, are shaping today’s newsletter landscape. Many newsletters exclusively lean in one direction or another — but there can be a third way: Finding a sweet spot between the two to create a more powerful email strategy.

Without a blend of the two, your emails might feel like a one-sided conversation. With too much personality, you risk ignoring the preferences and needs of your readers. With too much personalization, you’re not taking the time to tell the stories or build the 1-to-1 relationships that might cement your place in the inbox. It’s worth striving for a place somewhere in the middle. 

The good news is, no matter where your newsletter currently is on the personality vs. personalization spectrum, there are ways to add in more of whatever element you’re currently lacking.

Understanding the two pillars: Personality and Personalization

Let’s dig a little bit more into what defines each of these key ingredients in a good email conversation. 

Personality is when you, as a newsletter operator or brand, understand and articulate:

• Who you are.
• What makes you unique.
• Different ways to use prose to share your story and voice with your audience.

What’s the story behind the sender? You might be able to showcase that simply by positioning a single person (or a small group of people) as the face of your email strategy. It’s sometimes simpler for readers to connect with real people doing interesting work instead of a faceless company. 

Readers feel a little more connected to you as a brand when you tell them about your story or mission. The right amount of personality can make an email feel less like a pitch and more like a note from a friend — something to look forward to and something worth spending time with.

However, all the personality in the world won’t matter if you don’t hold up your end of the conversation — getting to know your audience and what it likes.

Personalization is unlocked when you:

• Understand who your audience is and what makes them unique.
• Find ways to share content that resonates specifically with them.

This is the part of the conversation where you eagerly learn more about the person you’re speaking with. You’re going to ask questions. You’re going to observe what they like and don’t like. You’re going to try to make sure your newsletters feel personal and are relevant to them. 

A reader doesn’t know how many other emails you’ve sent out that day. They don’t know if you’ve sent out a newsletter to 10 people or 10 million. All they can see is what’s in their inbox — and if what’s in their inbox doesn’t feel useful to them, you’ve just missed your chance to drive that reader to take relevant action.

Worried your newsletter is languishing by exclusively focusing on personality? Concerned your efforts at personalization have left your readers wondering who exactly you are? Don’t worry: There are concrete ways to add in more of each of these essential elements into your newsletter. 

How to add personalization

Let’s say you’ve already done a great job establishing your voice and your story, but you could do more to learn from readers and tailor content to them. Here are a few ways to add personalization to your emails.

Include a reader’s first or last name

Here’s the absolute simplest way to personalize a newsletter: Include a reader’s name.

Most email platforms offer the ability to add a snippet of code to your email, known as a merge tag. The merge tag is a field in a user’s profile — something tied to the email address on file. A merge tag might store data like a user’s location, job title, or name. On a platform like Mailchimp, for instance, if you enter this code — |*FNAME*| — into your email, every reader will see their name listed in that spot when they read the newsletter.

But in order to use these merge tags, you’ve first got to collect the data. That usually happens at the point of sign-up — you’ll ask users on the form to fill out an email address and first or last name. (Though it’s worth noting: Don’t ask for more information than you need. The more information a reader needs to fill out, the more likely it is that they’ll decide not to sign up at all.)

Then, in your emails, find ways to include the merge tag for their name. You can do that in a few different places:

• You can add it to the subject line (i.e. “Susan, we’ve got a few stories just for you”).
• You can add it at the very top of the email (i.e. “Dear Susan”).
• Or you can add it to the body of the email.

I love how a newsletter like Splice does this. They’ll add a first name into sections in the middle of their newsletters. As you scroll through the newsletter, seeing your name appear feels unexpected — and a bit more powerful than in a salutation at the top.

Deploy dynamic content within an email

Dynamic content is a way to show or hide content based on something in a reader’s profile.

For instance, let’s say you run a newsletter with a paid subscription component. In the newsletter, you might want to display a call to action to encourage readers to pay to read more content, but you don’t want to show it to existing paying subscribers. That’s something you can do with dynamic content — you can use your email platform to say, “Show this section exclusively to readers who meet certain criteria.”

That might mean:

• Thanking readers who pay to subscribe to your newsletter or publication and encouraging free subscribers to pay.
• Hiding certain content from readers based on their subscription status.
• Displaying a donation ask to readers who haven’t donated recently or who’ve donated less than a specific amount (say, $50) in the previous year.
• Showing a CTA to attend an event to readers located within 25 miles of the event.

In a newsletter like Claire’s Evil Witches, dynamic content allows her to send a single email out to readers but have the content of the email automatically show or hide certain content based on whether they’re already a paying subscriber.

Use progressive profiling to learn more about your readers and segment your audience

As we noted above, you don’t want to ask for too much information from a reader right away. Too much friction might keep you from getting that reader onto your email list.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask them for additional information. You just want to do it slowly.

Progressive profiling is the practice of asking readers, over the first few days or weeks, for some more information about themselves. Like Workweek, you might want to ask them for this information after they’ve signed up for the newsletter. You’ve already gotten their email address — now you’re asking for just one more thing. And if they don’t answer these questions, it’s OK since you’ve already collected their email.

Or maybe you want to ask these questions within a welcome email and then store the information in their profile. Email platforms like AWeber or ConvertKit offer the ability to automatically tag readers based on the links clicked in a newsletter.

What’s worth collecting? For many newsletters, basic data, like a reader’s location, might be enough. For a B2B or industry-specific product, more detailed data around a reader’s job title, place of employment, or level of seniority might be worth asking for.

Once you’ve collected that information, you can start to share content that might be relevant to them. For instance, if you’re planning an event aimed at executives who live in Atlanta, it’d be easy for you to identify which readers should hear about it first: Those who told you they were based in the Atlanta metro area and who serve in C-suite roles.

Your email platform can help you identify certain segments of readers, like who’s most engaged with your newsletter. But progressive profiling allows you to capture additional data to create more targeted segments. Not every reader needs to see every email, and collecting this data lets you send emails only to readers when they’ll be highly relevant.

Customize your welcome emails based on a reader’s interests

Here’s another way you can use this data: Show certain welcome emails for certain types of readers.

For instance, with Not a Newsletter, I’ve already got a welcome series in place. In it, I introduce myself, share a handful of resources, and recommend tools for your email strategy.

But what if I really wanted to customize things? I could always ask readers upfront where they work in the email space. Do they work in a newsroom? At a non-profit? On their own independent newsletter? If I collected that information, then I could customize subsequent emails. Publishers might get an email all about building a survey, including a link to a case study about how the Financial Times runs their surveys. Indie operators might get a similar email but with a link out to Ephraim Gopin’s story about running surveys for his own newsletter.

Not all email platforms allow you to build customized welcome journeys. Some platforms, like ConvertKit or Mailchimp, make it easy; others only allow for a one-size-fits-all welcome series or limit you to just a single welcome email.

Leverage personalization tools

There are lots of third-party tools that allow you to add personalization to your email. These tools will require an additional expense — but they might be worth using in certain cases.

Let’s say you’re a local newsroom that wants to show readers the weather near them and have it personalized based on zip code. You could do that with a tool like NiftyImages. If your company has physical stores, NiftyImages could automatically show a map with directions to the nearest store or insert a reader’s name into an image in a marketing message.

Litmus Personalize could be used to display relevant products or deals based on a reader’s shopping habits or display details like the local weather. It could even combine the two — in one case study, they reported that a fashion brand saw 69% more clicks by customizing the products shown in the email based on the current weather in that reader’s area.

A tool like CleverGIFs could be used to add an animated GIF, featuring a reader’s name in a call to action to purchase a subscription, product, or ticket to an event.

More sophisticated (and expensive) personalization tools, like Movable Ink, could create fully-personalized messages, like a post-purchase email that includes a next step customized just for that user. For instance, a reader who buys a subscription to a streaming service might see a welcome message with customized recommendations for movies or TV shows to watch next, all based on the data the company collected for that user.

There are also AI-based tools, like Echobox Email, that pull content from an RSS feed and turn it into a newsletter with stories picked based on a reader’s previous reading habits, or ESPs, like SailThru, that offer similar levels of personalization.

One more option: AMP for Email, which would allow you to add personalized elements, including polls or content, within a newsletter. (Two caveats with AMP: It only works in certain email clients, notably Gmail and Yahoo Mail, and isn’t supported by all email platforms. You can see the full list here.) If you want to experiment with AMP, try a third-party email builder, like Stripo, which offers out-of-the-box AMP-friendly elements that you can insert into a newsletter.

Run surveys or polls of your newsletter audience

What do readers want more of? You can use surveys to help identify topics readers want more of or identify content that they want to see in their newsletters.

Maybe you want to use that data to inform the next newsletter launch. (More on that in a moment.) Or maybe you want to use this data to segment readers. An email platform like Mailchimp offers its own survey tool, and you can automatically tag readers based on their answers in the survey. You could always use a third-party tool, like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform, and then use Zapier to add a tag in your email platform.

The same strategy might apply to in-newsletter polls — an answer might lead to a tag, and then you could segment your audience later on. For instance, a reader who said they’d be interested in reading more about local teams might get a call to action to sign up for a sports newsletter.

Launch new newsletters based on reader feedback

When Dan worked at BuzzFeed, they didn’t have any fully personalized newsletters. They didn’t use any third-party tools to customize the content in the emails or even collect a reader’s first name.

But they still tried to create newsletters that would be useful to specific readers. They looked at survey data (what readers told them they wanted) and on-site behavior (what readers actually clicked on, read, and shared) to identify potential newsletters that would be relevant for certain readers. They knew that not every reader wanted a newsletter about DIY or cats, but the ones who did would be unusually engaged. And with certain email-based courses, like their “4 Weeks To 5K Challenge,” readers would often email them back to say, “I feel like this newsletter was written just for me!” When they identified clear reader segments and created products for them, BuzzFeed could create newsletters that felt personal, even if they were aimed at a fairly wide audience.

How to add personality

In a lot of ways, personality is harder to add than personalization. There are so many ways to learn about your audience, but writing with a consistent, engaging voice is easier said than done. Never fear, though — it’s more than just the good luck of hiring prolific writers skilled at speaking clearly and in an on-brand voice. Here are a few ways to add personality to your newsletter.

Tell your story through a welcome series.

A welcome series is crucial in the first few weeks after a reader signs up for your newsletter. A great series establishes a relationship with the reader, builds trust, and guides them through the next steps on their journey.

Think of it this way: If the inbox is a digital living room, then your welcome series is the chance to introduce yourself and build a relationship with that reader. In those first few weeks, and in particular, in the 30 days after a reader signs up, you can (and should!) send a handful of emails to introduce yourself and your work. This especially matters if you sell something to a reader, like a product or a subscription, or are requesting a donation. If you don’t build the relationship first, that reader will be far less likely to pull out their credit card and take the next step.

So think about the people you want to introduce in those first 30 days. Maybe you want to send a note from a senior member of your team and give them the chance to tell readers a bit more about who they are and why they do the work they do.

Or maybe you want to introduce multiple members of your team in a single email. (You could also send this in addition to the welcome message from that senior member of your team.) If you do send a “Meet the Team” email, go beyond a bio — give them the space to share a bit more of their personal story.

You could even send a sales-focused email from a member of the team, combining that bit of personality with a pitch to make a purchase. Whatever you do, use the welcome series as a way to slowly build in more of the human side of your newsletter or business. You’re more than the brand you represent or the products you sell — use the welcome series to introduce the people behind all of this.

Add a personal note to a transactional email

Are your transactional notifications all business? They don’t need to be. Look at your automated notes, like receipts and shipping updates, and see if they can be zhuzhed up a little bit (as long as it’s within your brand’s tone and style) with more human writing, jokes, art, or even emojis.

Here’s a great example below,  from The Ollie World, which sells baby swaddles. After purchase, customers get this thank you message from the company’s founder, Hindi Zeidman. It’s an automated email — but the all-text approach and casual tone make it feel like a more personal email. Plus, there’s the subject line — “I just wanted to say thank you!” — which fits nicely with the body of the email.

Include new voices in your newsletters and marketing messages

Adding personality might mean starting really small. Maybe you want to add a few sentences at the top of your email with a note from someone on your team. Maybe you want to add a sign-off at the end of the email — a thank you from a specific person, with their headshot or signature attached.

Or you could find a way to include specific voices within your email. Let’s say you run a company that sells T-shirts. You could send your usual email about new products in stock or a big, 48-hour-only sale. But you could always add a human element, too. Find an influencer or just a member of your team, and include a section with recommendations or picks from them. Let them share a few sentences about why they really love the product. (Think about the “staff picks” recommendations you might see at your local bookstore, and try to emulate that tone.) That would give you a way to add a bit of voice to an otherwise generic marketing message.

You could try a similar tactic with testimonials from your audience. Collect those testimonials directly via a comment form or a survey, and get permission to use their name or photo. Then sprinkle those testimonials throughout your emails. The faces and quotes should catch a reader’s eye and give you a chance to drive that next step — Buy this! Subscribe now! Support us! — in a slightly different way.

Launch courses that have personality built in from the start

One of the biggest reasons why organizations don’t add voice to their emails is that they worry about having to constantly write new, original things. So anytime you can build voice into an automated message, it allows you to write something once — but still have it reach a wide audience in the long run.

Courses give you the chance to build an automated product mixed with a bit of voice. A course is a series of emails, kind of like a welcome series, that’s designed to educate, inform, or teach a reader something new. And like a welcome series, they’re fully automated. Once a reader signs up, they’ll get the series in full, even if they sign up months or years down the road. (There are courses Dan helped build at BuzzFeed nearly a decade ago that still drive sign-ups.)

A local tourism board, for instance, might use a course to walk future visitors through restaurants to try, hotels to stay at, and hotspots to visit — all over the span of a few emails. A reader could sign up today, tomorrow, or a year in the future, and they’d get the same series of emails.

Or take a look at this course from Toronto-based Bellwoods Brewery. In their five-day course all around hops, they tell readers more about how they brew beer and use their voice throughout the series. At the end of the course, they encourage readers to come in and sample their beer. The series is automated, and it drives sales, but it also leverages their unique personality.

Add personality to your surveys

Surveys may seem like a tough place to apply your signature personality, but there are ways to do it. Here’s one: Instead of sending your survey from your brand, try sending it from a specific person.

We love how the team at Grist experimented with this under their former newsletter editor, Annelise McGough. Their survey didn’t come from Grist — it came from Annelise. It even began with a personal ask: “Can you answer some questions for me?” Within the body of the survey, they continued to use words like “I” and “You” (i.e., “I want to know what you want to see more of in your newsletter. Will you pick the types of stories you want to see from the list below?”) This made readers feel like they were engaging with a real person, not a bot. 

Send personal updates about what your team is working on

Don’t underestimate the value of publishing a behind-the-scenes look at what’s happening at your organization. Tell your audience regularly about your progress and tell them about your goals.

Why? It’s an intimate act for a business owner or operator to draw back that curtain. When you start publishing regular updates about your progress, your audience transforms from customers into fans, people who want you to succeed and want to see you make progress. 

Plus, if you run a paid subscription or membership newsletter, you’ll find that every time you send a behind-the-scenes update, you’ll see a bump in paying supporters. Readers love to be a part of something — and when they know that others support your work, they often will, too. Just remember to include a link to that subscription page to make it easy for them to do so.

Thanks to our sponsor

The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our spring sponsor, Litmus. They’re an all-in-one marketing platform that empowers you to build, test, review, and analyze emails more effectively than ever so you can get the most out of every send. Learn why 700,000+ professionals trust Litmus to make every send count.