I'm totally going to date myself here... but as soon as I wrote 'Let's Get Personal' in the post title the song "Let's Get Physical" by Olivia Newton-John popped into my head and has been stuck on loop. Although I will say that I was still in elementary school when this song came out (trying to hold on to as much of my youth as I can I guess). I've gotten a wee bit obsessed with where things are headed in terms of personalization in marketing. I'm sure I would have dipped my toes in eventually, but as soon as we started working on LeadSurveys and what we wanted it to do, down the rabbit hole I went. I'll talk a little more about LeadSurveys in a minute, but let's talk about personalization. There are a few terms you're probably familiar with when it comes to personalization. You've seen people use custom fields or merge tags in email marketing (ex: Hi {first_name} and it automatically inserts your first name into the body of the email, or whatever name you gave them when you signed up in the first name field. ;- )). No doubt you've experienced some of this when you're online shopping and next thing you know you see ads everywhere for a product you were looking at a few days prior. This is the magic of retargeting.   It might feel a little creepy (Lord knows all of our action online is creating data for someone), but it's also making sure you only see ads for things you're interested in (note: I'm not saying you will only see ads for things you're interested in. It depends on how many ads are on a site you're looking at and the type of advertising the site owner is using). Things are going to get a lot more personal. I've mentioned in a few of my recent emails that I'm moving from Active Campaign to Drip. I've been really happy with Active Campaign but as I started digging into more automation I realized that Drip has way more potential with their features than Active Campaign does. I also read a great article by Andre' Chaperon where he explained in full detail the power of Drip and he more or less convinced me. I definitely have plenty to learn with Drip, but that's O.K., I'm in this for the long haul. Taking the time to set up these automations and send the right message to the right people at the right time will be golden. Here are a few of the things you're going to see more of when it comes to personalization: What does all this mean for you? You don't have to change everything you're doing, but you should start preparing for these options. The first thing I would recommend you do is to make sure you're using an ESP (email service provider) that has the power to do all of this (obviously my recommendation is Drip). If you're using an ESP that doesn't allow tagging or segmenting, then you should move to one that will does this now and start segmenting your subscribers. I recently wrote on post in more depth over at LeadSurveys that will explain where to start with this. Read 'Segmenting Subscribers: Why You Need to and Where to Start' I cannot recommend ENOUGH that you should NOT jump into every element of this at once. If all of this is new to you then you should simply start by planning and get the basics set up. Begin by segmenting your subscribers and deciding what the customer journey (or path) is going to be. You don't need to start building crazy funnels with upsells, downsells, etc. Start collecting emails and segmenting subscribers. That's step 1. How I'm doing all this... I've got the basics set up. I have a tagging framework that makes sense to me and follow-up sequences for each. The next step will be a more in-depth sequence with triggers built into the sequences. My challenge will be managing all of this while doing my daily emails. I love doing the daily emails and won't be changing that anytime soon, so I need to figure out the best way to use both without people being sick of hearing from me.