PERSONALIZATION

To Whom It May Concern

Have you ever received a letter addressed, to whom it may concern? Or perhaps Dear Customer, or Dear Valued Member? You may ask yourself, who would ever send a letter with salutations like that? It happens and it screams anonymous, unimportant. Would you spend your valuable time reading a letter or email that addressed you that way? Let alone respond to it? Probably not. Here are some studies that demonstrate how people feel about personal marketing:

Info Trends/Cap Ventures Direct Mail Study

Gotmarketing reports that "personalizing an email marketing campaign can improve response rates by 45 percent."

ClickZ shares data from a study that "found personalization was the most important factor when contributors determine which charity or fundraising direct mail they open at 62 percent."

So why would you produce a marketing campaign that isn’t personalized?  The answer may also surprise… it’s too complicated, we don’t have good data, we don’t have time, our other campaigns are not personalized.. you may have your own favorite. Personalizing your marketing is the single most important step you can take to make your campaigns more effective.

Personalization, It’s Not One Size Fits All

There are many different ways you can personalize your marketing. How you choose to personalize depends on both the technology you have for personalizing your materials and the data you have regarding your recipients. Some common ways to personalize outbound marketing materials include:

• Salutation
• Photos
• Purchasing preferences
• Past Donations
• Gender
• Age
• Geographic proximity

You can even combine different personalization techniques, for instance changing the text in a paragraph and swapping in a photo based on gender. But what is the right way to personalize a solicitation. The answer is, it depends. Assuming no limitations in technology and data, how you personalize depends on your audience, your own brand, the medium you use and the product or service you are promoting. You can overdo it. For example, imagine you are promoting a new checking service for a bank and you’re doing a postcard mailing . You decide to include the recipient’s name in the salutation along with information about the other banking services they presently use with your client. The person receiving your postcard may find it invasive to have what may be rightly considered private information printed on an open medium like a postcard and you’d likely be on the receiving end of complaints if you used personalization in this way. Similarly, mediums like email are widely perceived to be insecure so including personal information, beyond a name, in an email can be perilous.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

A good way to test your first use of personalization is to imagine walking up to someone on the street, engaging them in conversation. If you’re using email or postcards, you don’t want to include any information you would not expect to share in conversation in the first 15 – 20 seconds.  The goal of using personalization is to get the recipient engaged just enough to take the next step in your process. Again, using a personal encounter is illustrative. If you a walking down the street and you shout out ‘Hey You’ in hopes that Janet, the person a few steps ahead of you may or may not get Janet’s attention. Using Janet’s name which you read on the tag on her backpack, will produce a much greater chance that she’ll respond – even if she doesn’t (yet) know you. When she does respond and is curious why you used her name, you have a few seconds to convince her that you’re intentions are legitimate. If she concludes they are, you’ll get a little more attention. If you play your cards right following a process of providing just enough personalization and value at each step in the process, you might end up sitting together at the café on the corner laughing in conversation. The point is that there is a process involved and at each step using a little personalized information can help get you to the next step where your prospect will provide a little more information and be receptive to more and more in depth information about your value proposition. Crossing the line with too much too soon can raise walls that no amount of repeat solicitation will get past.

You Must be Mistaken

Ever had someone walk up to you and try and start a conversation using a name that isn’t yours? Your immediate reaction is “you must be mistaken”. As soon as a prospect who receives direct marketing materials concludes you must be mistaken, you’re finished. Making sure personalization matches the recipient is critical. There is no recovery in direct marketing. Consistency and technology are the best methods to ensure that John’s photo is used in the letter asking John for a donation. Consistency, as in the use of naming conventions for data that enable computer-based verification and technology as in using a computer program to make the choice of data and do the merging. These are tasks computers are well suited to perform and are also tasks that humans are well suited to mess up. Organize your information using systems that enable automated checking and use computers to perform both the merge and the checks.  One example of a system that uses these techniques would be a letter that uses a template called solicitation_template1 and a database called 12345. Proofs for checking a merge for a 100 record campaign using this information might include 2 proofs. The first, named solicitation_template1_12345_07072011_1_john_sample.pdf and the second, solicitation_template1_12345_07072011_100_jane_sample.pdf . From the file names we know which template, data file, and on which date the merge was created. We also know that the system produced record 1 and record 100 of the job, so we can assume that if these two are correct that 2 through 99 are also OK. Designing the system and organizing information intelligently eliminates the need to check each record to make sure the job was personalized properly.

Should you personalize your outbound marketing? Absolutely. Should you be judicious about the kind of personal information you use, accounting for your own brand, relationship with the prospect and the medium you are using. Without a doubt. Just as importantly, use intelligent organization and computer technology to do your merges and automated checks to ensure that your personalized marketing makes a positive impact.