If you think that using data \u2014 by itself \u2014 makes a mailing feel personal, think again. How many times have you received a direct mail piece or email that used your name or \u201cpersonalized\u201d images, but was irrelevant to you? Probably more often than you\u2019d like to admit.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
As a marketer, you don\u2019t want to make the same mistake. That starts with understanding that, by itself, data doesn\u2019t make a mailing relevant or compelling. Data is just that \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A mailing doesn\u2019t even have to be personalized to be relevant. For example, when you send a mailing to all inactive customers with, \u201cPlease come back! We miss you!\u201d along with a 25% discount, that\u2019s 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\u2019t do any personalization at all.<\/p>\n
So before personalizing any mailing, ask yourself, \u201cWhy 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?\u201d You don\u2019t want to run the risk of sending a personalized mailing without it actually being personal<\/i><\/em>.<\/p>\n Need help making sure your data results in mailings that are truly personal? Just ask \u2014 we\u2019d love to help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you think that using data \u2014 by itself \u2014 makes a mailing feel personal, think again. How many times have you received a direct mail piece or email that used your name or \u201cpersonalized\u201d images, but was irrelevant to you? Probably more often than you\u2019d like to admit. Say you are a golf fanatic, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-4754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.94.80.94\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}