Designing Databases to Support Email Personalization

YOUR DATABASE IS THE CORNERSTONE of your email strategy. It simply isn't possible to communicate with your audience unless you have a database with details of your contacts. Regardless of what database you use to store contact information, it is important to think of its functionality when populating it with content. Simply having a database full of email addresses is useless if you want to personalize your messages to groups of recipients. To use your database effectively for personalized email messages, there are two main issues to consider; namely, field separation and data style.

THINK PERSONALIZATION!!

When adding data to your contact database, it is important to think how that data will be used when communicating via email. The most common field used in email personalization is the name field. But there are many other ways to personalize effectively beyond using someone's name in your message. To most effectively personalize email messages, it is important to separate fields and input data strategically with email communication in mind. It is also important to think about the style of data that you put into each field.

Separating Database Fields

When building your database, it is important to break down the data to the greatest extent possible in order to maximize flexibility when using it to personalize emails. For example, rather than one Name field, split the data into two separate fields so that you can personalize using either First Name, Last Name or both. Consider also using a separate field for prefixes (Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr.) The same is true with any content that can be separated (i.e. addresses can be split into house name or number, street 1, street 2, city, county, state, country, zip code, etc.)

Obviously, the more fields that you have in your database per contact, the more flexible your personalization strategy will be. Consider the following uses of personalization in an email message:

When separating database fields with email personalization in mind, it is important to think about how each field might be used in your messages. To that end, it is important to think about what data style to use in each field.

Note: I already see that the screen shot that I put together for this article is not truly optimized for personalization. Can you see why? In the address field, I should have split the house name/number from the street name. That way, you could use the street name for personalization in an email (i.e. !*Street Name*! is abuzz with the news of lower mortgage rates!)

The Importance of Data Style within Fields

When populating fields in a database, it is important to understand how those fields might be used when personalizing emails later. First and foremost, the style used should be consistent throughout. When sending a message to a database list of contacts, consistency is crucial. For example, if you abbreviate some State fields (i.e. AL instead of Alabama) and spell others out entirely (i.e. New York), recipients will have different experiences with your message. While the New York recipient will be chuffed to see: New York is a great place! The Alabama recipient will be less impressed with: AL is a great place!

When using fields like Hobbies, ensure that the data style can be used successfully in a group message. Using the above examples, Swimming, Tennis and Surfing, it would be safe to use:

It might not be so clear if we used that statement if our data style for the Hobbies field was swim, tennis and surf. Not only would swim is a great activity sound odd, but we didn't think of the use of capitalization when adding our data to the field. Ensure that names, streets, cities, states, counties, and countries are capitalized correctly in your database. Be consistent with other fields. In the example database above, the Hobbies field is capitalized. That's fine, but make sure that you use the data in that field at the beginning of a sentence or in a bulleted list; and not in the middle of a sentence.

Spell out all field entries in their entirety so that they can be used in grammatically correct sentences within your message. Also, to successfully use fields like Hobbies when capturing the data automatically from an online form, consider using a complete sentence in your form:

That way, the word supplied is in relation to a verb that can be used later in a grammatically correct context.

What Happens When Fields are Blank?

Rarely is every field in a database filled in, especially if the fields are generated automatically by online forms. Some visitors might not want to include their street name, or you might not have someone's city listed. What do you do to prevent a blank space showing up in some messages?

Good group email software, like Infacta's GroupMail, has IF/THEN functions available. If you were sending an email to a group from your customer database for example, and wanted to personalize the message using your customers' first names, you would merge the name field from your database into the subject or body of your email (i.e. Dear !*First Name*!) But what if some customers didn't supply a first name? What if you only have a prefix and last name for some customers? With IF/THEN functions, you can select a term to replace those empty fields. So recipients without a first name in your database would receive, for example, Dear Customer (or whatever term you decide to replace empty fields with, i.e. Friend, etc.)

While populating databases with email personalization in mind might require some more time upfront, it is well worth the additional effort. A robust database will help communicators to be more effective with personalization, and ultimately strengthen relationships with their audience.