Personalization is an interesting topic in the marketing world. Strategies and techniques for personalizing products and messaging have been around for what seems now like forever. But still, it’s new enough that many consumers are not fully comfortable with the amount that businesses seem to know about them.

We personalize emails, direct mail pieces, display ads, and even websites. We use customer’s name, age, gender, physical location, and explicit preferences to dynamically show them different words, phrases, images, and offers.

The more we personalize a marketing message to an individual, instead of treating everyone the same, the more effective our marketing becomes. That’s what we’ve been told for the last five or ten years.

But is that always true? And will it continue to be true in the future?

Already, new technology can and will allow us to target new ads in new ways. Outdoor advertising will be able to change based on who is looking at it. Minority Report predicted that one. Television commercials will be directed at the person watching the TV.

We can imagine a limitless ability to personalize our messaging to every single person in the world. An infinite number of variables, an infinite number of messages, and even more sales for the companies that get it right.

But there has to be some diminishing return in these efforts. At some point, the money and time it will cost companies to become even more personalized will not be worth the number of new sales it creates.

The tech-savvy marketers out there are already experimenting to give us an answer, show us the way. Now it’s on you and your company to sit down and outline how you will use personalization to become better at marketing your products.

Because the overall truth still holds, some personalization works better than no personalization.