Thinking about personalizing your email marketing messages? That can help to build relationships with your audience, but keep in mind these cautions.

Personalization can help you speak directly to your customer or prospect and achieve the much-sought-after goal of one-to-one marketing. However, in some ways personalization can work against you. Keep in mind these precautions:

* Garbage in, garbage out. If some records in your database have missing or mixed-up fields, you can end up with odd constructions, such as:

Dear ,

We hope you've been enjoying the copy of you purchased from us back in .

or:

Dear VP Mktg,

We know it's not easy being Suzanne Myers of Wilmington, Delaware in Corrugated Products Co.

* It's best to avoid personalization in the Subject line; usually it sounds artificial. And if you use an informal Subject like "Hi, Bob!" the recipient will expect to find a note from a personal friend. He'll be annoyed when he finds instead a commercial message from your company.

* Be sensitive to privacy concerns. Don't overdo it. An email with too much of the recipient's personal information might seem like an abuse of privacy.

Whether you personalize your email marketing messages or not, it's important to make them sound personal, like a one-to-one communication from one friend to another.

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