What Makes “Personalized” Mailings Feel Personal?

 If you think that using data — by itself — makes a mailing feel personal, think again. How many times have you received a direct mail piece or email that used your name or “personalized” images, but was irrelevant to you? Probably more often than you’d like to admit.

Say you are a golf fanatic, and you receive a sporting goods catalog personalized with your name on the front cover, plastered with an image of the latest softball gear? Or you receive an incentive to bring your car in for a tune-up six months after your car was due?

As a marketer, you don’t want to make the same mistake. That starts with understanding that, by itself, data doesn’t make a mailing relevant or compelling. Data is just that — data. It is merely a piece of information that can be used well or used poorly. (Or it can be downright wrong.) This is why personalization and relevance are different.

Personalization is simply using data to create unique pieces for every individual in a database, whether those pieces are relevant to those recipients or not. Relevance is the attribute that makes the recipient feel that the communication is meaningful to them and is worth being picked up, opened, and read.

A mailing doesn’t even have to be personalized to be relevant. For example, when you send a mailing to all inactive customers with, “Please come back! We miss you!” along with a 25% discount, that’s creating relevance even if everyone in that mailing receives the same piece. Likewise, if you market different insurance plans to households with children than you do retirees, you are increasing the chances that the recipient will see the communication as relevant even if you don’t do any personalization at all. 

So before personalizing any mailing, ask yourself, “Why am I choosing the variables I am? How am I going to use them effectively? Do I need to add any other variables to improve my targeting efforts?” You don’t want to run the risk of sending a personalized mailing without it actually being personal.

Need help making sure your data results in mailings that are truly personal? Just ask — we’d love to help.

Please give us a call at 440-946-0606 for more information.

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Don’t Miss These 8 “Must Haves” of Marketing

It’s essential to pay attention to the marketing trends around you. Whether it’s a hot new color palette, a unique design aesthetic, or the need to be sensitive to specific social issues, paying attention helps you stay relevant. However, regardless of what’s hot right now, certain basic principles are important all the time, whether that is today, tomorrow, or ten years from now. Here are eight essentials of direct response marketing that you should be incorporating every time.

1. Have a great offer. Don’t assume the reader understands your full value proposition. The proposal needs to go beyond the product itself to include additional value elements, such as availability, delivery options, and technical support. You would be surprised how many marketers neglect to do this. Don’t be one of them!

2. Create urgency. Great marketing pieces create a sense of urgency. Unless yours is a complex, high-value product that naturally has a longer sales cycle, convince the recipient that the decision needs to be made right now.

3. Provide a clear call to action. Don’t assume your reader knows what you want them to do. Do you want them to make a phone call? Go online? Download an app? Tell them! Otherwise, there is a good chance they’ll do nothing.

4. Track and measure. If you do not measure, you do not know what works and what doesn’t. Measure everything.

5. Follow up. Whether by email, phone call, or mobile, following up to your initial offer dramatically increases your response and conversion rates.

6. Write strong copy. Effective selling requires marketing copy that shows that you understand your customer’s pain points and explains how your product solves them. It’s not just what you are marketing. It’s how you are presenting it.

7. Remember that results rule. This is why you measure. If it works, keep it. If it does not, scrap it.

8. Stay focused. Don’t get distracted by shiny objects. If a marketing campaign does not adhere to the previous seven rules, “just say no.”

Every once in a while, you need to go old school for a straightforward reason. It works.

Please give us a call at 440-946-0606 for more information.

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