“Insert Name Here” vs. “Relevant” vs.” Targeted”

by Denise Davert, Elixir

Variable data publishing, including transpromo, is one of many opportunities to speak to your audience in a way that addresses them as who they are as individuals—and everything from where they live to what they bought last week can be used to shape that message.

There are three levels of message customization: “insert name here,” “relevant,” and “targeted.”

The level you can achieve is determined by the capabilities of your design software and the amount of information you store on your audience members—information that resides in data repositories within your company.

Insert Name Here, the lowest level of personalization, is used when there is either little data about the recipient or no software application available to take advantage of conditional use of data in formatting the document.

Relevant should be used when you have minimal information about your audience, as when accessing a single database. For example, if you rent a database of contacts for a mailing to bring in new business, then the information you have might only include:

§  name

§  address

§  age range

§  sex

§  economic/earnings

The easy route to take with this data is to subdivide it into groups such as sex or geographic territory.

Dianne, we have a special promotion for Colorado residents!

The data, ‘name” and “state,” are used independently, without association to each other.

With robust document-composition software, you can craft messages that allow the individual data elements to work together to display relevant promotions:      

If:

Ø  cities: Select all with major league baseball teams

Ø  sex: both*

Ø  age: 35-55

Ø  median income: $80K-$150K

Then: Send a postcard featuring a large flatscreen TV with a baseball-related image on the TV screen and use the local team’s colors. 

*Hey, I like Boston!

Use your imagination to come up with other campaign messages:

Else if:

Ø  cities: all

Ø  sex: both

Ø  age: 18-25

Ø  median income: n/a*

Then: Send a postcard featuring the hippest MP3 device you sell. Who cares if they have a job? Their parents will buy it for them!

Wow. I just bought a 52-inch flat screen for the family room and an iPhone for my daughter. What might I purchase if the postcard was targeted even more to me?

Targeted messaging is effective, and the more data you can access, the more your postcard can be directed to the individual recipient.

The previous example uses just one data source, but achieving the highest possible level of customization requires that you reach across the organization into multiple sources. The key to the success of this model is that the software can create associations between individual data elements coming from disparate sources.

Let’s take those baseball fans for one more inning. That database you purchased likely could have contact names who happen to also be your current customers. If you’re limited to accessing only one database at a time per mailing, then you risk promoting a big-screen TV to a customer who purchased one from you last week.

Blush!

Carefully crafted targeted mailings eliminate these mistakes and will avoid customer irritation.

“I can’t believe they don’t know I just bought one of those!”

So grab your company database of customer names and purchases and bounce it against the mailing list you rented. You know who your customers are, and you can act creatively on that information.

You’ll accomplish a couple of things. First, your sales and marketing campaign efforts will be more successful because you’re not simply blanketing the earth with a generic offer. And you’ll avoid those embarrassing moments where customers question if you really even care about their patronage.

Visit Elixir to see a wide range of software applications that can enable any level of variable data publishing. http://www.elixir.com