Monday Martech musing #2

I’m in the thick of planning for teaching as part of our new MarTech courses in the RMIT University Marketing Department and one of our big topics is Personalisation.

Looking for class readings and content I came across a few interesting studies:

1. Back in 2018, Navdeep Sahni, Christian Wheeler, and Pradeep Chintagunta published an empirical study in Marketing Science (one of our highest ranked and rigorous journals) showing that something as simple as adding a participants name to an email subject line could increase opens by 20% and eventual sales by 31%. HUGE!
2. Then just 5 years later, Laurens Defau and Alexander Zauner replicated the study and found the effect had almost entirely diminished. They suggest it’s because the practice became so common and therefore lost impact.

This made me think of an essay from Keanu Taylor at The Martech Weekly and a great graph they had on the diminishing returns of different personalisation practices.

But it also got me thinking of Rasmus Houlind 🎀 and Frans Reimersma’s great Book ‘Hello First Name’ and their Personalisation Bowtie where they speak to personalisation being more around ‘moments of truth’ than personal details of customers.

All of this has led me to some big questions I’d love perspectives on to share with my students, including:

1. Is the impact of Personalisation actually decaying? Does anyone have updated stats, research, or case studies on this?
2. Is it about the type of personalisation? i.e. Name, personal details, even recent products browsed could by decaying but personalising on ‘moments’ is where the impact is?
3. If the effect of MarTech strategies decays over time as they become more common, what could be next? Are brands overdoing things now that could make them less impactful in the short to medium future?

Let me know your thoughts either by commenting below or getting in contact!

Want more insights like this?

Get in contact or explore ways to Work with Me.

Articles Referenced:

• ‘Personalization in Email Marketing: The Role of Noninformative Advertising Content’ by Navdeep S. Sahni , S. Christian Wheeler, Pradeep Chintagunta in Marketing Science, available at https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/mksc.2017.1066
• ‘Personalized subject lines in email marketing’ by Laurens Defau and Alexander Zauner in Marketing Letters, available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-023-09701-7