Common Personalization Mistakes in Marketing Cloud Next (and How to Fix Them)

Personalisation is one of the highest-leverage capabilities in Marketing Cloud Next — and one of the most commonly misused. Done well, it improves open rates, CTR, and conversion. Done poorly, it produces embarrassing deliveries, confused recipients, and worse engagement metrics than a clean non-personalised email would have achieved.

These are the mistakes that appear most frequently in Marketing Cloud Next programmes and how to address each one.

Mistake 1: Missing Fallback Values

What happens: An email uses {{First Name}} with no fallback value. 8% of your database has a blank first name field. Those contacts receive an email that begins "Hi ," — with a visible blank or the raw token showing.

Why it matters: A broken personalisation token is more damaging than no personalisation. It signals to the recipient that they are a database row, not a person. It also signals to spam filters that the email was not properly prepared.