You might imagine, since I work in the email marketing industry, that I would have a little compassion on the retailers whose emails fill up my inbox every morning. But most days, I’m just a typical consumer, rolling through about ten emails from Barnes and Noble, Circuit City, etc. in under two minutes.

Included in that batch this morning was the first edition I’ve received of the Priority Rewards Club newsletter from the IC Hotels Group. It, too, got the ol’ delete button after a momentary glance, but something I noticed in that momentary glance made me drag the message out of the trash and take a closer look:

That something I noticed was just my name. So vain, I know. And sure, we all understand it’s nothing fancy with databases these days to drop in a first name or other personal information. In fact, so many emails contain the “Dear Bob” style of personalization that it can be easy to overlook. But this newsletter gives the whole idea of personalization a bit of a fresh twist - first, by making it more of an “account profile” style of personalization, and second, by devoting some prime real estate of the newsletter to it. The fact that my name was strategically placed in the upper left hand corner is probably why it’s the only thing I saw in my momentary glance. It’s certainly something to consider if you use email as a loyalty-building and retention tool - it clearly worked on me today.

Now if I can just get the Carly Simon song out of my head.

Technorati Tags: email newsletter, email marketing tips, personalization, myemma.com, IC Hotels

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