| Best Practices in Strategic Email Marketing | June 2003 |
Execution
Getting personal
By Randall Litchfield
Personalization usually begins with putting the recipient's first name in the salutation, but can go much deeper depending on the quality of the contact database. Do you know, for example, what your customers buy, when they buy and how much? Or how about their last communication with you, whether by phone, email or a visit to your booth at a trade show? If you don't have the answer to these questions stored in a good marketing database, it may be time to make that company-wide commitment to CRM
Armed with good customer data you can do wondrous things customizing messages to individual interests - what we call dynamic personalization. And it's not as difficult or complicated as it might sound. Take a customer newsletter, for example. It's the 80/20 rule. Most customers don't need an entirely unique newsletter. They need your core newsletter with some special content aimed at them - preferably the lead story.
This could mean preparing three articles common to all customers, and then a fourth written exclusively for a particular segment. If you have four main customer segments, you would produce three common articles and four unique, for a total of seven. Your email marketing service provider (if you outsource) can easily slot in the appropriate article for the appropriate segment provided that you flag this in your database.
Why do it? It's all about response. Survey after survey has proven that the more you personalize email messages, the higher the response on all fronts - open rates, click through, pass along and, ultimately, purchasing. In terms of lifetime value of a customer, the more you know about them and convey the sense that you understand their needs, the greater the loyalty you'll earn.
When is the right time to try this? Usually after you've mastered some of the other best practices. There is quicker bang for the buck in writing better copy, improving creative design, and doing more thorough testing. Dynamic personalization is one of the steps that you take when you're already doing some things right, and then it's just another of the right things to do.
Randall Litchfield is President of Inbox Marketer, an email marketing and publishing company.
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