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 all of us marketers would 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. Or you made a one time purchase of a gift for a family member or friend, and now you are getting monthly mailers for these products you have no interest in. Do any of these sound familiar? As a marketer, you don’t want to make the same mistake.
The first step to solving this impersonalized mailing problem is 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 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 include personalization at all.
It's more about your audience than your message.
Recently, we have started using Tactix360, including options for new ways to mine customer data in order to gain information from your mailings and build buyer-personas in order to send relevant information in the future. Some of these options include:
Call Tracking – See data on how many call from the mailer you sent out, and listen to how these calls later. This data can be extremely impactful to employee training and improvement. (A dental office who included this service increased their conversion rate from 18%-47%).
Online Follow-Up – Have a specific QR code or website that is on your mailer. You will be able to track how many visits to the site you receive from that mailer, where they are from and what types of actions they did or did not complete on your site.
It's usually between the 8th and 12th touch that one makes the decision to buy your product or service. And did you know that 96% of visitors leave without taking action? Luckily, retargeted visiotrs are 70% more likely to convert on your site.
You don’t want to run the risk of sending a personalized mailing without it actually being "personal".
Are you wanting to get more data from your mail pieces? Or need help making sure your mailings are truly personal? We are here to help.
