Personalization the old-fashioned way

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on September 24, 2008

In her post on beginner mistakes, Anna Billstrom suggests that owners of small lists might apply advanced tactics "by hand": personalizing marketing email with individual notes, etc.

It's a concept that deserves expansion to a wider context.

A lot of winning email tactics are effectively an attempt to automate and reproduce a traditional human exchange of communication.

If you go into a small store and buy a product, you (should) get a kind word and acknowledgment of your purchase.

So we set up order confirmations and thank you emails to reproduce that "real life" process automatically and digitally.

If we hand someone a business card at a meeting asking them to send more details about their product, we expect an immediate response.

The supplier won't take the card wordlessly and walk away: they'll likely express thanks for our interest and maybe talk a little about what we can expect to receive.

So whenever someone signs up to a list, we reproduce that offline experience by triggering a welcome message, about which much has been written (most recently by Dylan Boyd and Justin Premick).

But in the rush to automate, have we forgotten the opportunity to connect the old-fashioned way? With an email "handwritten" by someone?

Now, writing individual notes to each of your 2 million subscribers might be a little resource intensive and raise some ROI issues. That's not what I mean.

There are also clever tools out there that pull content together from different sources to create unique emails based on what you know about the subscriber. So it looks like a "just for you" email. I don't mean that either.

But suppose we think for a moment about how we might react if a particular online interaction took place offline. And use that to decide whether that interaction might justify a more personal email intervention.

Here's what that might mean in practice...

1. Can your system or staff flag customers who make an online purchase that is more than X times the average?

The CEO / sales manager / customer service rep can then send a personal email to that buyer. One that goes beyond the standard platitudes you find in the automated order confirmation that "normal" buyers get.

If you owned a jewelry store, you wouldn't go out front when people buy the $40 friendship ring. But when someone wants the $10,000 diamond engagement ring, wouldn't you be out like a flash to give some personal attention?

2. What about flagging those who buy X times more often than the average customer? Or have been on your list for X years and are still responding?

3. What if someone on your database is blogging about your products and sending you heaps of prospects? Would they deserve a personal email?

4. If sign-ups come from an offline source, how about a field in the welcome message for the "owner" of that source to insert a personal message up top?

"Hi Tom, here's the official welcome to our newsletter. Thanks for signing up for it at the store. If you ever need anything, just call in or you can reach me on jim@bigretailer.com"
- Jim Smith, Manager, Vienna branch.

"Hi Jane, thanks for stopping by our booth at the ACME show last week. Here's the official welcome to the newsletter you asked for. If I can help in any other way, drop me an email at susan@bigb2bsupplier.com"
- Susan Johnson, Sales Manager, NW division.

I'm sure you can come up with more and better examples.

One of my favorite authors on email newsletter issues is Michael Katz. In his latest newsletter, he put it best when he wrote:

"Technology is great, but it's no substitute for human interaction"

Indeed.

(P.S. This kind of personal intervention needn't always be an email, either. A real letter or a phone call might substitute. Remember letters?)

Tags: email marketing, personalization, trigger emails, welcome messages, customer service

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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1 Comments:

I've seen some of the spammiest attempts at personalization lately. Its always obvious when you have "Hello joe fox" Who the heck woudl capitalize hello without capitalizing J and F - obviously dynamic insertion. I'm all about dynamic insertion to increase trust in email marketing, but its gone way too far. At least if you are going to do it, make the capitalization and punctuation correct. Goodemail marketing services should incorporate dynamic insertion with professional personalization> One cool thing I like in HTML mails is the use of a image signature at the bottom, making it look sort of like a letter. One client of ours had a financial newsletter that we used this on and it converted really well and had a solid subscriber base.
By VisiSeek.com, on 01 October, 2008