"Hi {{first_name}}" is not personalisation. It's a merge field. Every email platform on the market can insert a first name. Every recipient on the planet knows this. Nobody has ever thought "they used my name, they must really understand my business."
Real personalisation means the email feels like it was written for this person, in this role, at this company, in this industry, in this location. Not because it uses their name. Because it references their actual situation.
The gap between merge-field personalisation and genuine personalisation is where most B2B email marketing underperforms. Closing that gap doesn't require magic. It requires data, structure, and a willingness to write more than one version of an email.
Think of personalisation as a spectrum. Each level adds relevance and increases the likelihood of a reply.
Level 0: No personalisation. The same email to everyone. "Dear Business Owner, we offer marketing services..." This is spam. Don't do it.
Level 1: Name and company. "Hi Sarah, I noticed that Acme Ltd..." This is where most businesses stop. It's better than nothing. It acknowledges the person exists. But it's surface-level, and recipients know it.
Level 2: Industry-specific. The email references challenges, language, and context specific to the recipient's industry. An email to a law firm mentions compliance deadlines. An email to a logistics company mentions fleet management costs. The core message might be similar, but the framing matches the reader's world.
Level 3: Company-specific. The email references something about this particular company. Recent expansion, new office, change of director, specific products they offer. This requires individual research and doesn't scale easily, but the response rates are dramatically higher.
Level 4: Individual-specific. The email references something about this particular person. A LinkedIn post they wrote, a conference they spoke at, a project they mentioned publicly. This is the highest level of personalisation and the hardest to scale. It's also the most effective for high-value targets.
Most campaigns should operate at Level 2 or 3. Level 4 is reserved for the top 20 prospects who justify individual attention.
Earlier this year, we built a personalised email campaign for a golf networking business. They run events across the UK, each hosted at a specific venue with a local ambassador who manages the group. They had a database of around 22,000 contacts across these groups.
The obvious approach would have been to send one email to the full list promoting the next event season. The less obvious, more effective approach was to personalise by group.
Each email variant referenced the recipient's nearest group, the venue where it's held, and the ambassador who runs it. Instead of "Join our next event," the email said something like: "The next Stoke Park event is on the 14th. James mentioned that spaces are filling up faster than usual this quarter."
Same core message across all variants. But each one felt local, specific, and connected to the recipient's actual experience of the network. Not a broadcast. A personal note.
The response rate on the personalised version was roughly three times the generic alternative. Not because the copy was better. Because the relevance was higher.
This level of personalisation is impossible without proper data. If your contact records contain only a name, email, and company, you can't personalise beyond Level 1. You're limited to "Hi Sarah" and nothing more.
To personalise at Level 2 and above, you need structured data on each contact: industry, company size, geography, role, and ideally some form of engagement history or contextual information. This is where the prospect database work I've written about throughout the year connects directly to campaign performance.
Every hour spent enriching your contact data pays back in campaign performance. An email that references the recipient's industry and location converts at a higher rate than one that doesn't. An email that references a specific company challenge converts higher still. The data makes the personalisation possible. Without it, you're guessing.
The question I get most often is: "How do you personalise for 5,000 contacts without spending months writing individual emails?"
The answer is segment-based personalisation. You don't write 5,000 individual emails. You write 8 to 12 segment-specific versions and map each contact to the most relevant version.
Segment by industry (3 to 5 variants), then by company size or geography (2 to 3 sub-variants per industry). A campaign targeting 5,000 contacts across manufacturing, professional services, and technology, split by company size, might require 9 to 12 email variants. Each one takes 20 to 30 minutes to write. That's a day of work for a campaign that feels individually relevant to every recipient.
Within each variant, use merge fields for the truly individual data: name, company, and any other contact-specific field. The combination of segment-level personalisation and contact-level merge fields creates an email that feels personal without requiring personal-level writing effort.
Here's the difference in practice.
Generic: "Many businesses are looking to reduce their operational costs in Q4. We can help."
Industry-personalised: "Legal firms across the South East are facing pressure to reduce operational costs while maintaining compliance standards. The firms we work with have found that print management is one of the quickest wins."
Company-personalised: "I noticed Blackstone Solicitors recently opened a second office in Reading. Managing print costs across multiple sites is one of the challenges our clients in the legal sector deal with most frequently."
Each level adds effort. Each level adds response rate. The business decision is where on that spectrum the ROI peaks for your specific campaign and audience.
Over-personalisation is real and it's creepy. Referencing something that feels too private, too specific, or too surveillance-like backfires badly. "I saw you were in Waitrose on Tuesday" is personalisation in the technical sense, but it's obviously inappropriate.
In B2B, the line is usually around information that the person has made publicly available versus information that feels like it was obtained through monitoring. A LinkedIn post they published is fair game. Their browsing history on your website is not something to reference directly. The company they work for and their role is fine. Their salary, their commute, or their personal life is not.
The test: if the person asked "how did you know that?" would the answer feel normal or uncomfortable? "I saw it on your company website" is fine. "Our tracking pixel identified you as a visitor" is not a conversation starter.
If your contact data is thin, start where you are. Even basic industry segmentation, splitting your list by sector and writing a version for each, is a meaningful improvement over one-size-fits-all.
Then invest in enriching your data over time. Add industry fields. Add geography. Add company size indicators. Each additional data point enables another layer of personalisation.
Personalisation isn't a switch you flip. It's a muscle you build. Every campaign that's slightly more personalised than the last one moves the needle. Start now, start where you are, and improve with each send.
Martin Dugan, AA2
