A study done on personalized communication, involving the different characteristics of participants, measures the effectiveness of personalization.

Personalized communication is getting increasingly popular as a means for companies to target an individual's self, but is it effective?
With today's technology there is an overflow of resources and services that can be found online. In order to focus this overflow and make it easier for individuals to sort through and access the information they want, some companies have tried using personalized communication to reach their consumers. Personalized communication is where a company takes information on an individual, like their name, their age, their gender, their interests, or their purchase history, to tailor a unique message to the person. By referring to specific aspects of an individual, the company hopes to make their message more noticeable and persuasive. However the effectiveness of personalization is unclear. There is limited research on the subject and the results have been mixed.

This study was aimed at finding the effectiveness of personalized communication, while factoring in characteristics of the individual subjects.
In this study, the researchers wanted to find the effect of sending personalized emails versus generic emails to a sample group. But they also wanted to take into account the different characteristics of the subjects. The sample was broken under three different characteristics: the consumers' need for uniqueness, privacy concerns, and trust in a company. Each participant in the study was labeled as either high or low for the three characteristics. The sample size was made up of 109 Dutch undergraduate students, 73.4% women, and between the ages 18 and 31, with an average age of 21.20 years old. Everyone participating in the study received an email from the University Sports Centre. It was randomly assigned whether they would receive the generic newsletter, or the personalized version that included the recipient's name three times throughout the text.

The participants' reactions to the USC newsletters were measured through a survey to see the effect of the personalization.
At the end of the email the participants were told to take a survey. They were asked if they wanted to return to the USC website to get more information, to measure their behavior. They were asked how thoroughly they had read the newsletter, to measure their attention. They were asked how likely it was that they would contact the USC and how likely it was that they would join the USC, to measure intention. Additionally their evaluation of the newsletter, their attitude towards the USC, and their personal characteristics were also measured in the survey

The results showed a significantly more positive evaluation of the personalized rather than the generic newsletter. 
The results of the study show that the subjects evaluated the newsletter more positively and had more positive thoughts when they received the personalized email rather the generic email. This proves that a personalized message is more persuasive than a generic message. However no major differences in attention, attitude, intention, and information-seeking behavior were expressed between those that received the personalized or the generic message.

This first graph on the top left shows that for subjects with a high need for uniqueness (or high CNFU), it was no surprise that they evaluated the personalized email much higher than the generalized email. And subjects with a low need for uniqueness (or a low CNFU) gave both the personalized and generalized emails similarly good evaluations. The next graph on the top right shows that subjects with a high privacy concern measured a higher intention, that they were more likely to contact and join the USC, when they received the personalized email. For subjects with a low privacy concern it was the opposite. They measured a higher intention, to contact and join the USC, when they received a generalized email. The third graph on the bottom left shows that subjects with a high privacy concern measured a higher behavior response, to go to the USC website to get more information, to the personalized email. And the subjects with a low privacy concern measured a higher behavior response to the generic email. Finally the last graph on the bottom right shows that subjects who had high trust in the USC company measured a more positive attitude response to the generic email, whereas those subjects that had low trust in the company measured a more positive attitude to the personalized email. 

Unexpected results show that personalization is not always the most effective tool, depending on the characteristics of the audience.

For the personalized characteristics, the results were not what the researchers had expected. The researchers predicted that the participants measured as high for a need for uniqueness would show a higher persuasiveness for the personalized rather than the generic newsletter. However, participants with low privacy concerns, had a significantly stronger intention to contact the USC in the generic message than the personalized. The personalization did not make low privacy subjects more inclined to contact the USC. And for participants that had trusted the USC as a company, they expressed a more positive attitude toward the company after reading the generic, rather than the personalized message. Despite not getting the results that they expected, the researchers explained possible reasoning for the study's results. When personalization is not justified or necessary, it is not seen as genuine. Therefore people's attitudes can be less positive, especially if people had trusted the organization originally.

The issue of the effectiveness of personalization is not over yet, more research can be done focusing on the stages of information processing.
The study concluded that although personalized communication can positively influence a person's attitude towards the message, it does not really affect their behavior or their attitude towards the company. Even though the results from the study show that personalization is not that effective, the researchers say that more research needs to be done before any definite conclusions can be drawn. As a next step the researchers say that the focus should be on personalization in terms of the stages of information processing, to find what the effect of personalization is on an individual's perception of a company.