Sinner_G - 11:55 am on Jul 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

I'm not sure whether this is just your choice of focus, but I miss the important part of personalisation here. But first let's not forget that email marketing should ALWAYS be opt-in (I guess everyone agrees on this by now). So here you have the option of getting the preferred name of the user. Ted, I suppose you don't use the 'Warren T.' bit when you enter your name somewhere. So with that you already have the right name for the greeting.

Your points subject and body copy are 100 % valid. If you are going to write a personalised email, use the target's name only in the greeting.

As I said, the real personalisation part has nothing to do with names in my book. More important is the possibility of choosing your areas of interest when opting in. Than as the sender you can have a database where you enter your copy and an email template which chooses what content to put into the mail according to user preferences.

Basically, it is content management applied to email.