Are You Realizing Personalization's Full Potential?

With direct marketing today striving for goals such as"hyper-personalization" and "personalization at scale," Barry Feldman of Feldman Creative recently put together an infographic for MarketingProfs to illustrate the potential of personalized marketing for those who still think “Dear FirstName” is enough. As data brokers and data services providers, AccuList is especially interested because personalized marketing relies on up-to-date, enhanced, accurate data to deliver on the promise—the right message, to the right person, at the right time—whether for customers or prospects. Customer outreach and the customer-based analytics for targeting prospects require collecting data from as many sources as possible: CRM, web activity, e-mail, direct mail, mobile apps, second- and third-party demographics, social media, and multichannel advertising. And then that data must be combined and maintained in a regularly hygiened customer data platform. Haven’t gotten there yet? You’re not alone. Only 5% of marketers have attained a single customer-data view that allows launching personalization across channels, per the infographic. So why worry about an edge gained by just 5% of competitors? When 78% of Internet users say personally relevant content increases their purchase intent, and 81% of consumers say they want brands to know them better and to know when (and when not) to approach them, any brand that is ignoring that demand for personalization is ignoring the bulk of their potential market. What do customers and prospects want? Feldman’s infographic breaks it down into “four R’s.” People expect to be recognized by name and to have their preferences remembered so that brands can make suitable recommendations and send relevant offers. Studies find that such personalization can cut acquisition costs by up to 50%, lift revenues by 5%-15%, and increase the efficiency of the marketing spend by 10% to 30%, per the infographic’s sources. Plus, in a competitive market, personalization will woo the 60% of shoppers who prefer to do business with brands that provide personalized, real-time offers and promotions. While discussions often focus on digital efforts, traditional direct mail also has benefited from technology trends, such as variable data printing, PURLs and QR codes, to enable greater personalization. For more on how direct mail can realize personalization's potential, see https://www.acculist.com/is-your-direct-marketing-realizing-personalizations-potential/

Personalization Spurs Digital Results, If Done Right

Personalization is becoming best practice for e-mail, mobile marketing and digital display ads, and recent marketing data underscores digital personalization's potential power, asserts a ClickZ article by Tess Wegert. Consider "Share a Coke" labels personalized with 250 popular names, which "reversed a decade-long decline in U.S. Coke consumption," per a Wall Street Journal report. Another example from Wegert is the personalized interest- and location-specific video ad campaign by automaker Land Rover, which lifted brand awareness by 50% and purchase intent by 53%. In the e-mail arena, data shows that personalized e-mails can yield transaction rates and revenues six times higher than non-personalized messages, she notes. And when it comes to online ads and content, Yahoo reports that 78% of consumer surveyed say they want some degree of content personalization. But, Wegert cautions, personalization can be a double-edged sword, turning off audiences if it is inconsistent, intrusive or mistargeted. She cites three basic tactics for succeeding with digital personalization: 1) coordinate messaging across all channels; 2) go slow and avoid creepy, excess personalization upfront and all at once; and 3) make sure personalization is targeted based on accurate data and profiling. For the complete story, go to http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2374653/the-importance-of-personalization

Automation Revs E-mail Response, Data Demands

Automation technology can turbocharge e-mail response, provided your marketing organization is prepared to take advantage. Just take a look at Silverpop's impressive evidence of e-mail automation's impact on opens and clicks. According to Silverpop's annual e-mail marketing metrics benchmark study, automated messages achieved an open rate nearly 15% higher and a click-through rate nearly 79% higher than their manual counterparts last year. The study examined messages sent by more than 3,000 brands across industries and geographies in 2013. Response metrics like those recently inspired Ellen Valentine at ClickZ to urge expanded use of automation -- as long as the groundwork for success has been laid with marketing vision, skills and data. "If you don't have great data on your customers and prospects, you become much more limited in how you'll be able to deploy automation technology," warns Valentine. "Consider every way your customers interact with you -- whether it's on the Web, on a social channel, on a mobile app, or within an e-mail -- and how you can capture and integrate these behaviors into your marketing efforts." If the data tasks seem overwhelming to internal teams, she suggests calling in a third party to help augment databases and speed integration -- and that could include the data professionals at AccuList USA, of course. For the complete article, see.http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2355480/survey-says-automated-emails-outperform-manual-counterparts

How to Feed 'Good' Data to Your Marketing Database

A challenge in the Big Data era of myriad potential data feeds is to select inputs that are usable, useful and cost-effective for marketing ROI. Not all data is created equal! To that end, we'd like to pass along a recent MarketingProfs six-point questionnaire to help you score data candidates for integration into your central customer and prospect database. Half of the questions deal with the crucial need for a unique identifier on imported data (such as an e-mail address or phone number) so that new data can be matched to the existing marketing database. If the identifier doesn't exist, can it be created (appended, for example)? Next, consider the overlap between a data feed and the customers and prospects already in the database: If the goal is inexpensive integration of targetable info (behavioral, purchase and demographic attributes, or additional contact points, for example), high overlap is good. (For database growth, not so good, we would add.) Finally -- and this is the key issue to our mind -- you need to determine the potential financial benefit from new data in terms of increased revenue. That, of course, assumes a basic understanding of customers from existing data. For the full MarketingProfs data-scoring article, see http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2014/25212/is-your-data-any-good-six-questions-to-help-score-your-data-resources

E-mail Sign-up at Purchase Is Top List Building Tool

To grow e-mail opt-ins, 63% of marketers found e-mail registration during purchase very effective for list building, yet only 41% of marketers used the tactic to collect e-mails, according to MarketingSherpa's latest E-mail Marketing Benchmark Report survey. Capturing e-mail addresses during purchase involves both online and offline transactions, and appears to be a continuing challenge for marketers. Online issues include required e-mail subscription as a barrier to purchase, communicating the value of joining an e-mail list, location of the e-mail sign-up request (shopping cart or thank-you page), clarifying opt-in options to avoid unsubscribes, and excess e-mail post-purchase. Offline issues include set-up and training for coordinated e-mail collection via stores, call centers and direct mail, and providing incentives for e-mail sign-up, such as contests, coupons, additional discounts and exclusive content. For more detail on the benchmark survey, go tohttp://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/registration-during-purchase-list-building

Want to Grow Your E-mail List? Turn to Direct Mail

With studies showing the average e-mail list suffers an annual 30% attrition rate, e-mail list growth requires an aggressive lead generation program to do more than just run in place. And direct mail is a great way to rev up that e-mail opt-in acquisition, asserts Cyndie Shaffstall, founder of Spider Trainers, a managed automated e-mail services provider, in a recent Target Marketing blog post. Using direct mail will avoid the risks of e-mail renting, purchasing, borrowing and partnering, risks that run from customer complaints all the way to getting blocked or blacklisted, she points out. Direct-mail lists also are typically less costly than e-mail lists, providing cost savings that can be applied toward mail postage and printing. To execute your mail-to-e-mail conversion campaign, obtain a direct-mail list sans e-mail address but otherwise using list selects for appropriate targeting. The goal is to collect e-mail addresses down the road -- e-mail addresses specifically opted in to your messages. Next craft direct-mail creative that will entice engagement through the use of a high-value offer and drive traffic to a targeted squeeze page and, in many cases, from there to a microsite. The squeeze page and/or microsite will be focused either on introducing the brand or introducing the product, depending on the audience's level of brand recognition. Mail recipients attracted to the squeeze page or microsite will be asked to supply an e-mail address. Visitors may also be asked to respond to a limited number of simple questions for lead scoring. Lead scoring of responses can flag recipients ready for immediate sales follow-up (high scorers), or move respondents into an active nurturing campaign (mid-range scorers), or drop prospects into a drip campaign (low scorers). To maximize e-mail opt-ins, Shaffstall notes two key tactical issues. First, the higher the value of the gift, the higher the conversion rate. Second, the more focused your direct mail list, the more likely it is that the audience will be receptive to your offer. For an example of one company's successful implementation, go to http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/blog/mail-to-email-conversions