Tailor the message
Personalization
Personalization interventions tailor the content of a communication to the individual recipient — their name, their balance, their specific situation, the consequence that applies to them. The mechanism is salience: a generic message is easy to ignore; a specific one is harder to dismiss as 'not about me.'
4
Experiments
4
Policy areas
2012–2022
Year span
3 / 4
Positive
When it works
When the recipient has the specific context to act on — their account number, their court date, their child's school. Personalization on dimensions the recipient cannot act on adds nothing.
Watch out for
There is a privacy cost to personalization. Recipients can find detailed personal data in a letter unsettling — especially when the source of the data isn't obvious. The right test compares personalization with explicit transparency about how the agency got the data.