Email Personalisation Basics

What is Personalisation?

Personalisation means tailoring email content to each individual recipient based on data you hold about them — their name, preferences, past behaviour, or segment membership. Even simple personalisation (like a first-name greeting) can significantly improve open rates and click-through.

Personalisation Tokens

A personalisation token is a placeholder in your email template that is replaced with a recipient-specific value at send time. Common examples:

Token	Replaced with
{{first_name}}	Recipient's first name
{{email}}	Recipient's email address
{{account_number}}	The recipient's account reference

[!WARNING] Always provide a fallback value for every token. If the field is blank for some recipients, the fallback prevents awkward gaps like "Hello, !" — instead showing "Hello, there!".

Dynamic Content Blocks

Beyond token replacement, you can show or hide entire content blocks based on audience rules. For example:

• Show a loyalty rewards banner only to customers with 500+ points
• Display different hero images for UK vs US recipients
• Include a renewal reminder block only for subscribers whose contract ends within 30 days

Dynamic blocks are defined by rules in your sending platform, evaluated per recipient at send time.

Segmentation

Good personalisation starts with good segmentation. Break your audience into meaningful groups before defining content rules:

1. Demographic — location, age, job role
2. Behavioural — past purchases, email engagement, website activity
3. Lifecycle stage — new subscriber, active customer, lapsed

Testing Personalised Emails

Before sending, always:

• Send a seed list with test records that exercise every branch of dynamic content
• Use your platform's preview with data feature to verify tokens render correctly
• Check the fallback values work for records with missing data

Best Practices

• Keep personalisation relevant — over-personalisation can feel intrusive
• Respect preference centres and unsubscribe requests immediately
• Document which data fields each template depends on so the team can maintain it