Email marketing is no longer a blast. That’s right. If you are sending the same email messages to every customer, you are woefully behind the times, out of step, and worst of all–an ineffective marketer.

Smart businesses personalize their marketing emails. And by personalize, I mean going far beyond sticking the customer’s name after “Dear” in the salutation.

Use the information at your fingertips

Email blasts, or e-blasts, are a thing of the past because of advances in technology. Companies of all sizes can now gather information about individual customers, their personalities and their preferences, and use that information to send highly personalized and pertinent emails to their customers.

It’s worth the effort

Stacks of stats show, as you would expect, that personalization pays. Click-through rates rise by an average 14 percent. Personalized subject lines are opened 25 percent more often. And, most impressively, a personalized email boasts a transaction rate six times higher than one that’s not.

Think of personalization as a gigantic dinner party, where you divvy up guests and seat them at different tables based on what they like to eat.

Here are a few ways you can divvy up your customers, so that you can send messages that fit their interests and purchasing habits.

• Purchasing history
• Age
• Gender
• Geographical location
• Job title
• Company size
• Interests

Personalization in action

Let’s look at how a couple of ways personalization could work. Suppose you are targeting people who have purchased items from your company in the past. Using data from your CRM system, you can break these customers into several groups and send emails aimed at their buying style. For example, you might send different messages to these three groups: high-end spenders, repeat customers and those who recently made their first purchase.

A customer’s geographical location can be used to personalize in several ways. Restaurateurs who offer carry-out service within a certain radius of a restaurant’s location would send those customers a different message or offer than potential customers who live beyond the delivery zone. Other businesses will benefit from tailoring their email messages based on gender or age. For example, if you sell shoes or clothing, you could tailor your emails to women and men. Going a step further, you could develop messages for young women, middle-aged women, young men and older men.

The Amazons and Zappos of the world have been doing this for a long time. But the good news is that now smaller businesses can do it too, without devoting six people and an entire IT department to the task.