Hey [First Name], check out this email!

Over the past 5 years or so, the email industry has been making its move through the trends of great marketing habits to have. Not only has email evolved into a beast for sales, it has become a great way for brands to reach out to their consumers ⁠— and on an extremely personal level at that.

Is email actually creepy or just personal?

As ESPs like Google, Mailchimp and Litmus expand the abilities of even the most basic emails, consumers and privacy groups alike have started asking if email has gotten a little too personal.

My wife recently received an email from one of my favorite brands Fenty by Rihanna, and the pretext subject line went something like this: "We saw you lookin, make the first move". You can see the rest of the email even tells her to just buy something already!

Some context — my wife was simply "window" shopping on the Fenty website after receiving an email (har-har) about these newly released products, and she of course left the site without adding anything to cart. Enter Fenty's cookies, which tracked her and then proceeded to trigger a campaign (the one shown) to remind her to give in to her desires and buy buy buy! What's even creepier is that if she would have added the products to cart, the subject line would have also called her out by name.

So... is this a new level of creepy marketing, or just a brilliant way to personalize the consumer experience? Everyone feels differently. My wife, who is an email marketer by profession, launches into a fantasy-land over emails that target consumers and do it well. Her excitement level at seeing a well-thought-out, beautifully designed, passionately engaging email in her inbox seriously makes her spend the rest of the day studying the ins-and-outs of that brand's entire email strategy. She's the type of person who has 54,823 "unread" emails in her inbox and she lets them stay that way — collecting them if you will.

And then there's me...

I absolutely HATE seeing emails in my inbox that call me out by name, that stalk me, or that pretend they know what I'm looking for. I like seeing my inbox clean and clear, everything marked as read, uncluttered. As a "marketing" person myself, my equivocal disdain for email always surprises me, and I realize it's because regardless of my profession, I am an individual who values my privacy. I may use my real email to subscribe to something, but the name I use is often a pseudonym. Not only that, I have an email I use specifically for when I am ready to commit to an actual opt-in — a place where all the emails I either love or just must-have land.

So, who are you even subscribed to?

It takes a lot to get my commitment to an actual subscription. I hit the "unsubscribe" button as quickly as an email can land in my inbox. Just because I buy something, doesn't mean I want to commit to seeing a company's products in my inbox every single day, sometimes even multiple times a day. I leave the "I agree to opt-in to special deals and product updates" disclaimer boxes completely unchecked. As I mentioned, brands who maintain their spot in my inbox are ones I absolutely love, either from a design perspective or because, like most millennials, I shop there frequently and need the latest coupons or discounts.

That list of my current opt-ins is as follows:

• Starbucks - Yes, yes, I am one of "those" and yes, I am aware they're over-priced. I have a love-hate relationship with Starbucks. I've un-subbed and re-subbed several times, but at the end of the day, I love my Mango Dragon Fruit Refresher Sub Water for Strawberry Acai Base.

• IKEA - I used to love the design of Ikea's emails. Their modern 'Scandinavian' designs usually spilled over into their email designs, but lately they're looking more and more... lazy, less design and more "we need to sell products now!" So my opt-in is more for the amazing coupons they offer to "family" members anddddd I live close by so I frequent Ikea alot... like a lot a lot.

• Olive Garden - Honestly, I'm not sure how or why I am still subscribed to Olive Garden emails. In college I ate there quite a bit but now I rarely go, so... after this I'll probably unsub, especially since they often call me out by name and email me more than once in a single day.

• Yeezy Supply- If you weren't aware, I am also a new-to-the-game sneakerhead and I, at one point in time, spent 24-48 hours hoping and waiting for these emails to buy a single pair of sneakers. The Yeezy's have since lost me as far as design and "resell" culture, so they too are on their way out of my inbox.

Honorable mentions would be:

• Urban Outfitters - They once had beautifully inspiring emails, with GIFs and editorial like designs, but they emailed entirely too frequently with no option to change frequency preference.

• Adidas - Another brand that can have beautifully designed emails, but do 'personalization' wrong. They offer shopping recommendations on styles and designs I've never looked at and don't really care for.

• Bird - They have simple, clean, and attractive emails. Nice to look at but no other added value for my personal day-to-day

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools a brand can have and utilize, but it must be done effectively. You have to spend a great deal of time getting to know your audience, discovering what they like to see, and more importantly, what they don't want to see. For some people, creepy is not creepy, it's just personal, and too frequently isn't frequent enough. If your email data supports it, act accordingly but don't be afraid to try new things and send your audience an email that not only promotes your product but is an added value to their life over-all. I am constantly lurking on Really Good Emails, hunting for brands who deserve to be subscribed to and who serve as true inspiration. Quality tends to overrule quantity with email. You have to be able to maintain attention and engage with an audience who barely has the attention-span/patience to read past 140 characters or watch videos longer than 15 seconds.

P.S. in the course of writing this, I have FINALLY removed Olive Garden from my inbox.