Laser-guided Messaging: Blow Past the Clutter and Into Customers’ Hands

Keys to standing out in packed mailboxes and inboxes

Personalized relationship marketing is about to become a way of life at many companies. Sending more personalized messages to customers is the number one strategy companies intend to use to boost ROI, found a study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council.

What the research says

The study focused on challenges, solutions and new strategies for achieving greater revenue. Its findings:

  • More personalization is coming - 60% of companies said greater growth lies in messaging that’s more personalized, relevant and precise.
  • Incentives are out - only 9% plan on developing new incentives for prospects.
  • The goal: better segmentation - 60% plan to focus on improving their segmentation, profiling and targeting strategies. And 49% plan to improve database systems.
  • Multi-channel’s in too - 30% indicated a move away from message blasts to carefully tuned multi-touch communications (print, email, call center), calculating ROI by connecting the final revenue to the message series.
    Cutting through cluttered mailboxes and inboxes will require that kind of personalization, says the Council.
What marketers can do

Bertelsmann Direct North America is one company that’s been testing more personalized messages. It says they always work better than mass mailings.

Whether it’s a reply card inserted into a mailing, or an email that says “Hi John” v. just “Hi,” its personalized messages always pull the more responses.

Bertelsmann’s high ROI, qualified responses and conversions come from developing communications around key elements such as (in order of importance):

  1. Profile - creating offers based on expressed personal interests
  2. Industry - delivering industry specific solutions or case studies
  3. Browse history -finding interests based on past interactions (usually online), and
  4. Search - building messages around what prospects have searched for

Reprinted with permission from The Marketing Report, 370 Technology Drive, Malvern, PA 19355, 800-220-5000.

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