Think about the last personalized email you received. That message that greets you by name, recommends exactly what you’ve been looking for, and arrives at precisely the right moment.
Now imagine the text is light gray. The CTA button doesn’t work with your keyboard, and the hero image contains all the important information and has no ALT text.
Is that really a personalized experience?
We’ve become so obsessed with personalization. We track clicks, purchases, information requests, browsing behavior, location, preferences, and past interactions. We use all that data to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
But we don't always stop and think about how people read, navigate, and interact with our carefully crafted messages.
Maybe we’ve been going about personalization all wrong. 🤔
In his article, The Business Case for Accessible Communications in a Personalized World (LinkedIn), Michael Kaminski tells us that accessibility can be integral to personalization. Whether the communication is transactional, informational, or promotional, it can, and should, be both relevant and inclusive.
Using my name is personalization.
Knowing what products I’m interested in is personalization.
But can I actually understand, navigate, and interact with your communication?
That's where accessibility and personalization intersect.
Personalization is about delivering a message that is relevant to an individual. Accessibility is about making sure that individual can actually perceive, understand, and use it. Those should not be separate considerations.
Personalization is More Than Just Knowing My Name
We often think of personalization as putting someone’s name in an email or serving up content based on what they’ve clicked on in the past. But personalization is about more than just knowing who someone is. It’s understanding how they experience information.
People read, navigate, listen, search, and interact with content in all kinds of different ways. Truly effective personalization recognizes those differences and is accessible, inclusive, and designed for how people actually interact with information.
And the good news is making your communications accessible isn't all that complicated. Truly effective personalization looks like this:
Sending a personalized email?
- Use actual text instead of embedding important information in an image.
- Give informative images meaningful alternative text.
- Use sufficient color contrast.
- Make links and buttons descriptive.
- Structure content with headings that make sense.
- Don't rely on color alone to communicate information.
Sending personalized video? Include accurate captions and transcripts. If you communicate important information visually but not through speech, provide an accessible alternative.
Creating personalized documents? Don't assume that exporting a Word document to PDF magically makes it accessible. Make sure your PDFs and all other digital documents have proper headings, reading order, tagged content, accessible tables, and useful metadata.
Building personalized forms? Give every form field a meaningful label, make instructions and error messages clear, and ensure the form can be completed with a keyboard and assistive technology.
And perhaps most importantly, don't assume everyone wants or needs to experience your communication in exactly the same way. Offering choices for communication format, language, or channel can itself be a form of personalization.
None of these best practices undermine personalization. In fact, they raise the bar. The goal isn’t to create a more customized experience for some people at the expense of others. When you design for how people actually experience information, you’re not taking personalization away; you’re making it more effective.
Knowing who I am doesn't matter much if you don’t consider how I experience your message.
Shift Left in Your Personalized Communications
Personalization asks: What’s the right message, offer, or content for this person, and when should they receive it?
But another question belongs in that decision: Can this person access, understand, and interact with the message we’ve carefully crafted for them?
Because a personal experience isn’t truly personal if someone can’t use it.
You can have the world's most sophisticated personalization engine and still deliver a terrible user experience.
Accessibility isn’t something to inject after you’ve created your communication. It’s part of creating a meaningful, inclusive communication from the start.
When you're deciding what message someone should receive, also consider how they will access it.
Accessibility as a Competitive Differentiator
Making communications more inclusive can significantly expand an organization's reach. It can also strengthen customer loyalty by demonstrating a commitment to inclusivity and care, values that increasingly influence consumer choice.
But as expectations evolve, leading organizations are recognizing that inclusive design is more than a legal safeguard. It’s an opportunity to build deeper relationships with customers and deliver better experiences for all.
Once treated as a regulatory obligation or compliance checkbox, accessibility is now emerging as a competitive differentiator. ~ The Business Case for Accessible Communications in a Personalized World, Michael Kaminski
The main takeaway here is this. The goal of personalization shouldn’t simply be to make people feel seen. It should be to make sure they can participate. A message isn’t truly personal if the person it’s meant for can’t access it, understand it, or act on it.
Think of it this way. Personalization gets your message to the right person. But accessibility makes sure it actually includes them.
Resources
- Creating accessible and inclusive communications
- Beyond Best Practices: Rethinking Accessibility in Email Marketing
- The Business Case for Accessible Communications in a Personalized World
- Incorporating Accessibility into Communication: A Guide for Modern Communicators
A human author creates the DubBlog posts. The AI tools Gemini and ChatGPT are sometimes used to brainstorm subject ideas, generate blog post outlines, and rephrase certain portions of the content. Our marketing team carefully reviews all final drafts for accuracy and authenticity. The opinions and perspectives expressed remain the sole responsibility of the human author.
