Most of us know from Dale Carnegie's principles in his book "How to win friends and influence people" that using names is great for relationship building and it's these same principles that you should apply to your email marketing campaigns.

So why is that so many people still get the name thing so horribly wrong? Only this week we had a client who made a major name error, by having the first "embarassing body part" of his surname entered in the wrong data field, which resulted in them having to write a formal apology to the individual concerned. Oh dear, not the best impression to give.

Yep, the honeymoon period in a new business relationship can soon come to an abrupt end, if you get a name wrong! That initial greeting has a tremendous impact as to whether a recipient will bother to read the rest of your email.

Using both your recipient's personal name and company name, or subject of interest in the subject line, can measurably improve open rates and get things off on the right foot. Here's a very lovely email I got this week "Alison, thanks for booking your Mini One service with Bluebell BMW." It would not have felt quite so lovely if the subject line started with "Wall, thanks for booking your BMW service"

Take a bit of time to personalise and show that you care! Your recipients want to feel special and unique and they want to know that you know a bit about them. Errors in your data lead to your emails showing how poorly you know them, which will just alienate them.

And it gets worse....an unhappy email recipient can easily hit the reply button to let you know you've got it wrong. It's not like direct mail which just gets binned if the name is wrong as it's too much effort to write back to complain. Those reply and unsubscribe buttons look very appealing to an offended email recipient.

Take a bit of time to do your homework and make that recipient feel special and who knows, it could be the start of a beautiful relationship!