Baudville may provide custom recognition products and programs, like trophies and employee gifts, but for a while its direct mail marketing strategies were far from award-winning. “We were certainly behind the curve as far as using the digital print options that are out there,” says Bruce Malone, Baudville director of CRM. That changed when Baudville recognized that personalization greatly heightens the customer experience.
The company launched a digital print campaign that personalized the front cover of its IDville-brand catalog to include a customized nameplate, badge, and lanyard, all displaying the recipient’s name.
“It’s fully digital print, so the customer’s name will look like the rest of the print on the cover,” says Malone. “It’s also high-resolution and will appear the way we’ve wanted our personalized covers to appear all along: as if someone printed a cover just for you with your name on it.”
Further pushing the personalization envelope is Baudville’s “personalization” via targeting. The company uses MeritDirect‘s list management and segmentation services to target education buyers with a 92-page custom catalog specific to their needs, rather than using mass-mail delivery. And plans for later this year include personalizing pages two and three of Baudville’s catalog to reflect a direct mail recipient’s previous buying behavior and the company’s new product availability.
Direct mail gets personal
Like Malone, more and more marketers are acknowledging personalization’s power to enhance the customer experience and drive revenue, increase basket size, and convert browsers into buyers. In fact, Malone anticipates a 10 to 25% lift in response rates with its personalized education catalogs.
According to the “Real-Time Marketing Insights Study” by marketing technology provider Neolane and the Direct Marketing Association, 77% of respondents found real-time personalization to be highly important. Among today’s channels, marketers said that delivering dynamic, personalized content in email (80%), on the Web (69%), on mobile devices (53%), at the call center (49%), at the point of sale (49%), and via social channels (45%) are all highly important. Delivering personalized communications doesn’t stop there. Direct mail personalization may not be real time, but it’s just as important—in part because digital and contact center personalization set customers’ expectations to expect targeted, relevant communications across all channels.
“Successful marketers must always endeavor to interact effectively with their customers through personalization at every touchpoint to provide the right message at the right time,” says Judy Berlin, VP of marketing at XMPie, a marketing software provider. “In fact, customers are now expecting a certain level of relevant content, and increasingly notice and dismiss generic, nonpersonal material.”
At the same time, marketers are looking for new ways to personalize their direct mail efforts beyond simple salutations and even customized content. One approach is creating and maintaining lists that allow for effective segmentation. By carefully building a house file, whether through referrals, word of mouth, social media, or simply acquiring data from third-party providers, marketers can slowly begin to identify and target the right customers for specific direct mail campaigns.
“Maintaining a high-quality database and list is paramount,” says Greg Grdodian, CEO at Reach Marketing, a multichannel marketing solutions provider. These days, marketers’ preferences may range from firmographic details to customer buying behavior. “Some [marketers] will want information on software installed, some clients just want an SIC code, some want job titles—it all depends on the client and what they’re looking for,” Grdodian says. “But the data is out there; it’s just a matter of working with a reputable firm to ensure the highest quality data is being used to enhance your customer base.”
Once marketers assemble the right list, Grdodian says, the sky’s the limit for personalized direct mail. He cites as an example a financial service company whose response rates to its direct mail campaign were dropping fast—and for good reason. “[It was] basically sending the same piece to everybody and only using the individual’s name for personalization,” he says.
So the company worked with Reach Marketing to dive into its direct marketing database and segment its customers by industry, as well as to “change the creative so that it spoke specifically to an individual’s market,” Grdodian says. For example, restaurant owners received direct mail pieces whose “look and tone” were tweaked to speak specifically to that target demographic. “The results were significantly higher [than the generic mailers], not only because the financial firm’s direct mail was geared more toward individuals, but also because it put customers at ease and gave them a sense that the organization worked with people in similar professions,” he says.
Mixing it up
Another way marketers are making sure direct mail delivers results is by adopting a hybrid approach to personalization. Forget about single-source lists. “Hybrid databases are performing exceptionally well now,” Grdodian says. That’s because multisource lists leverage multiple consumer and business databases compiled from a variety of sources to create a more comprehensive view of customers and prospects. Demographic, firmographic, geographic—they’re all different types of information that can be integrated into one holistic, hybrid database. Better yet, many marketers are pulling transactional data from multiple platforms, like ERP systems and point-of-sale solutions, and combining this data for a more comprehensive snapshot of customers. Because this holistic customer view comprises so many data points, marketers can more accurately personalize messaging and content, as well as personalize their direct mail by optimizing segmentation and targeting.
This level of data also can help marketers personalize their direct mail by integrating it with other channels that interest individual customers. For example, a mailer to one customer might include a QR code, while a mailer to another may highlight a personal URL or a Facebook promotion. “The marketing mix today really should be a component of offline, telemarketing, banner ads—the full suite,” Grdodian says. But marketers need to ensure that the same degree and granularity of personalization is applied across a variety of channels for multichannel consistency.
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XMPie’s Berlin agrees, saying that marketers should select multichannel software solutions that offer electronic delivery, inbound communications, and print capabilities in a single, holistic system for more personalized customer interactions. “By using personalized links and QR codes to personalized landing pages, marketers can enhance the print piece and help bring the recipient into the conversation with much greater ease,” she says.
What’s more, Berlin says that using personalized imagery with “attention-grabbing, photorealistic effects” is another powerful strategy for effective personalization.
The digital print revolution
New digital printing technologies also are enabling greater levels of personalization for direct mail. Debora Haskel, VP of marketing at IWCO Direct, points to continuous inkjet printers as a recent example of a technological advancement that’s inspiring greater customization in direct mail campaigns. According to Haskel, the speed and convenience of these printers is letting marketers customize a single mail piece for a customer in multiple ways—a process that used to be too time consuming.
In addition to high-speed hardware, highly scalable data publishing software is also to thank for a “digital printing revolution [that] has completely leveled the playing field.” Berlin says. “Even smaller scale marketers with low budgets can now implement Web-to-print management systems and produce sophisticated, one-to-one variable data print material with outbound and inbound capabilities, such as personalized URLs and QR codes.”
Some marketing experts warn, however, that there’s such a thing as over-personalizing a direct mail piece. In some cases, delving into a consumer’s personal data too deeply can create a creepiness factor, Reach Marketing’s Grdodian points out. And personalization techniques that are too specialized may alienate or overlook entire segments of a target audience, he says.
The secret, Grdodian says, is to strike the right balance. “You don’t want to dive so deep that you’re speaking to three people,” he says. “What you want is for the individual to always feel like you’re speaking to them. After all, it’s possible to create the appearance of one-to-one communication when it’s really one-to-5,000.”
Marketers are also looking at another technology that may be the next big thing in personalized direct mail. “The age of augmented reality [AR] is coming—if it’s not already here—and print will be a unique facilitator into that world,” Berlin predicts. “With AR, marketers will be able to connect with their customers in distinctive and entertaining ways.” For example, snapping a picture on an encoded print piece with a smartphone can easily “add new levels of a digital experience through sounds, videos, and gaming,” Berlin says. “The possibilities are endless.”
Still, IWCO Direct’s Haskel emphasizes that marketers must distinguish between personalization and relevance when creating a direct mail campaign. Personalization helps shape what information goes where on a particular direct mail piece; relevance is about crafting content that speaks directly to a target audience’s needs at precisely the right time.
“What [drives] response and conversion rates,” Haskel says, “is being able to make relevant offers, not just personal offers. With some of today’s more sophisticated database analytics and mining capabilities, the ability to create relevant offers is becoming easier. The promise of one-to-one marketing that we’ve all been talking about for twenty years finally is here.”
