Use Personalization with Marketing Analytics to Increase ROI

It’s no secret that in this down economy direct marketers are continuing to find themselves under more and more pressure to do more with less — while at the same time continuing to deliver better results.

Recently, we were talking with a colleague about using more personalized communications when marketing to customers and prospects.  Our colleague, Michael Hurley, works for Imago Digital.  They use personalized marketing — and several forms of it — on their most successful direct marketing campaigns that they create for their clients.  It turns out that this is an excellent idea — you should see some of their response and conversion rates on these personalized campaigns.  They are through the roof when compared to traditional direct mail campaigns.

You may ask “why all the hub-bub on personalized communications?”  Well, to nobody’s surprise, personalized marketing is very customer-focused.  And, being customer-focused works!  In fact, there are many case studies that present success stories when utilizing personalized messaging.  The results of these studies are tied to huge increases in ROI on direct marketing campaigns.

We recommend taking this success to the next level by combining personalization with marketing analytics. And why not combine personalization with known attributes about your customers or prospects?  Doing so can grab hold of the recipient’s attention by communicating the most relevant message to the right groups of people.

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this. First, start out by profiling your customers to better understand what attributes that they possess that make them your customers.  You’ll end up with a good idea of exactly what your buyers look like.  Once you’ve accomplished this for your customers, look at a representative sample of folks who aren’t yet your customers and determine which of them look most like your buyers.  By targeting those prospects that most closely resemble your customers, you’ll be increasing your chances of turning prospects into customers.

Next, you can segment your customer universe to hone in on those groups that share certain characteristics, then design your messages to speak to those characteristics.  As seen in our previous post on creating effective segmentation plans, it’s amazing how effectively you can “speak” to your customers when you better understand who they are financially, ethnically, psychographically, etc.

So, as you are planning future campaigns, think about using personalization along with marketing analytics to really increase your results.  Over time, you’ll notice the profitability of your marketing efforts increasing, along with the products sold and lifetime value of your customer base.  This is a winning scenario that we promise will make you more successful!