Most 'personalisation' is mail-merge with extra steps.

Putting someone's name in a subject line isn't personal, it's just a variable. Real personalisation means the message would make no sense sent to anyone else, and that takes knowing something, not just merging something.

I got an email last week that opened with "Hi {FirstName}". The merge field hadn't even fired. But honestly, the ones that get my name right aren't much better — "Hi Mick, as a valued leader in the consulting space" — because the personalisation stops at the greeting. Everything after it is the same email everyone else got.

This is what most "AI personalisation" turns out to be: the same message, with a name and a job title stapled on. Mail-merge with extra steps.

Personalisation is about relevance, not tokens

Putting someone's name in a subject line isn't personal. It's just a variable. Personal means the content would be different for a different person, because it reflects what they actually do, what they have bought, where they got stuck, what they asked last time. That requires knowing something, not just merging something.

The reason most teams stop at the name is that real relevance is harder. It needs the data joined up and a system that can decide what to say, not just where to paste the token. So they automate the easy, visible part and call it personalisation.

Where AI actually helps

The genuinely useful version is AI that drafts a different message based on what the record actually tells you. The customer who only ever buys one product line hears about that line. The lead who went quiet after a pricing page gets a different note than the one who booked a demo. Not a name in a slot, but a message that would make no sense sent to anyone else.

Done well, the recipient can't quite tell it was automated, because it reads like someone paid attention. Done the mail-merge way, they can tell instantly, because nobody did.

Where to start

Look at your last campaign and ask one question: if you stripped out the name and the company, would it still be obvious who it was written for? If not, the personalisation was decoration. Start by making one message genuinely depend on one thing you actually know about the person, and build from there.