Data Doesn’t Make It Personal

Have you ever received a “personalized” mailing that didn’t seem so personal? 

Maybe you’re a tennis nut, and you received a sporting goods catalog personalized with your name on the front cover, plastered with an image of a brand new set of golf clubs. Or you received an incentive to bring in your car for a tune-up six months after your tune-up was actually due. Maybe the data itself was correct, but your name was spelled wrong. Or the marketer addressed the mailing to “Francis.” You hate the name Francis. That’s why everyone calls you Fran. 

Data, by itself, doesn’t make a mailing relevant or compelling. Data is just that — data. It’s a variable in a database field. Each is merely a piece of information that can be used well or it can be used poorly. Or it can be downright wrong. 

This is why personalization and relevance are two different things. Personalization is simply the use of data to create unique pieces for every individual in a database. If those variables are not used in a way that increases the level of interest and engagement with the target audience, it’s not relevant. Relevance is created by sending a piece that means something to the person receiving it. 

In fact, a mailing doesn’t have to be personalized to be relevant.  You can create relevance by segmenting your database and creating mailings relevant to each segment. 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 to retirees, you are increasing relevance even if you don’t do any personalization at all, even by name.  

The goal of great personalized communications is to do both—segment the mailing by gender, company size, market vertical, or some other demographic—then add relevant personalization on top of that. If you’re targeting by market vertical, for example, you might personalize by name, then adjust the copy and images based on the recipient’s job title. Even if you are marketing the same product (say, security systems to schools), you’ll focus on different features and benefits when speaking to the chief financial officer than you will when speaking to the director of facilities. 

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 (append my database) to improve my targeting efforts?” This way, you don’t run the risk of sending a personalized mailing without it actually being personal. 

Planning Your Next Print Project

Most successful printing projects don’t happen by accident. They start with a good plan. By developing a plan in advance, you can save money, time, and energy throughout the process. 

Good project planning starts with some very simple steps. 

1. Share your design with us. 

By bringing us into the process during the design stages, we can tell you whether certain ideas will have an impact on the time or cost of the piece. For example, you might not realize that some binding options can take extra time or that a certain trim size might incur extra costs. 

2. Consider your suppliers’ schedules. 

Are you bringing outside suppliers into the process? If so, how do their schedules impact yours? If you are using a freelance illustrator, for example, what is this person’s availability? If changes need to be made later on, will this person be able to respond in a timely fashion on a short turnaround? If you’re placing a label on a specialty bottle, will the bottle company have sufficient supply during your timeframe? 

3. Plan backwards from the delivery date. 

Keep us informed about your progress. We juggle many jobs at any given time. If you don’t meet your date to get the files to us, your delay can have a ripple effect. We might place another job on the press in front of yours, and have to push your project back to the next available opening. The larger the job, often the more difficult it is to reschedule.

4. Add a “fudge factor.” 

Always add in buffer to accommodate slippage in the schedule. The larger the project, the more buffer you will need. 

5. Communicate!

Keep people in the loop, and let them when you need the job in your hands. When everyone is communicating effectively and working toward the same goal, you are more likely to be rewarded with a project that comes in on time and on budget.

Lead Nurturing vs Drip Email Marketing Campaigns

A guy walks into a bar and spot someone he finds very attractive. He comes groovin’ up slowly and pull out his best line - “Come here often?”

Awkward Pause 

In real life what he says next is going to depend on how his target reacts to his best line. (Good luck!) But this isn’t real life. This is marketing. And our lascivious lothario is using the new hammer being hawked to him by every marketing software dealer on the block: Drip Email Marketing.

“Drip marketing is way cool!” they tell you. “It’s automated! All you have to do is push this button.” And so it is.

Drip marketing is named after the infamous Automatic Drip Coffee Maker. No matter what you do it just keeps dripping. All you can do is turn it on and off.

A drip email campaign sends email number one, then waits for some pre-determined amount of time – let’s say three days – and then sends email number two. Seven days later it sends email number three. And so on.

What it doesn’t do is react based on how any of your emails are received by your prospects. No matter how they react, you just keep going, saying predetermined things at predetermined intervals with no regard for the other person’s reactions or interest.

“But wait! My marketing automation system lets me do one thing if they click a link, and a different thing if they don’t. That’s behavior based, It’s not just basic marketing.”

Well, then riddle me this. Out of every 100 individuals that click through from an email in your drip campaign, how many of them look at only page one before they hit the highway?

Better yet, which prospects looked at several pages and spent at least 2 minutes browsing your site? Aren’t they more qualified than those one-page-and-out bouncers?

And what about the prospects that checked out your conversion page for at least 10 seconds but still didn’t convert? Are some of those prospects associated with large opportunities in your CRM system? Can your drip campaign react or branch based on that information? Automatically?

Or does your drip marketing software force you to treat all of these prospects equally? I assure you, not all click-throughs are created equal.

There are a lot of marketing tools out there that do things that weren’t possible a while back, like sending a series of emails on a timed schedule automatically. This is drip marketing. But sending a predetermined set of emails to every prospect, no matter their reaction, can produce some disappointing results. Just as if you walked into a bar having pre-determined exactly what you’d say and when you’d say it, no matter what reaction or interest your efforts elicited.

You’ve made, or are working on making, the move away from homogeneous, one-time email blasts to drip email campaigns. Congratulations are in order!

However, if you’re ready to take your ROI to the next level you need to step up from drip marketing to true Lead Nurturing.

Capable lead nurturing systems allow you to build campaigns that treat all prospects different based on different levels of qualification. For example, looking at more than 5 pages vs. only one page would assign a different lead score number to each prospect. Or being associated in your CRM with an opportunity $X and having looked at your pricing page for at least 10 seconds would assign another lead score number.

Tip: Evaluating Lead Nurturing Systems

 Look for tools that allow your campaigns to branch or trigger emails and other actions based on more than if a prospect clicked through from your email. Look for tools that allow your campaigns to react fluidly based on meaningful combinations of conditions that are indicative of more highly qualified prospects such as:

• Number of pages viewed after the click
• Which pages were viewed or not viewed and for how long
• Association with valuable CRM opportunities
• Current lead score
• Decision maker status

Many popular marketing tools available today lack these capabilities. You’re forced to run a brief campaign and build a list of prospects who took qualifying actions when the campaign is over. Then, you use this list to create a second campaign, a third, etc… 

A better approach is one that enables you to create just one ongoing campaign that branches as needed based on whatever qualifying conditions you choose.

Make sure your marketing automation system is capable of paying real attention to your prospects and how they react to your communications across multiple channels. You’ll be getting more satisfied customers on a regular basis.

You Don’t Need Big Data for Personalized URLs

If you have not yet used personalized URLs to boost response rates and survey your customers, what is stopping you? Is it because you don’t have a database to deploy the campaign? If so, you might have a misconception about the way personalized URLs work. 

While there are some campaigns that use detailed customer and prospect databases to create very sophisticated, highly personalized mini-sites, these are the exception. Most personalized URL campaigns are used for lead generation and can start with a simple mailing list, whether in-house or rented. The purpose is to use those initial contacts to develop a more sophisticated database for later.

Personalized URL campaigns really shine as a data-gathering technique. Success is all about how you use that all-important survey page. You might survey respondents about pain points in their business, their preferences in electronic gadgets, or their political opinions. The goal is to gather whatever information will best suit your larger campaign goals.

One marketer, for example, experienced a 74% sales conversion rate following its personalized URL campaign because it used the personalized URLs to survey its prospects on their pain points before making personal contact. This put its salespeople in a position to suggest the appropriate programs right away—during the initial meeting—making those contacts highly effective.

So don’t allow lack of databases to be a barrier to implementing personalized URL applications. Instead, look at these campaigns as tools that allow you to gather information to increase the effectiveness of your sales follow-ups or to improve your targeting the next time around.