Personalized Marketing offers increased response rates and return on investments.  To successfully implement personalized marketing tactics you must first have a database.   But, a database alone is not enough.  Databases can only be useful if they’re sorted, analyzed and have turned random consumer data into usable consumer information.

While sorting your database can seem to be a Herculean task, the benefits of taking the time to sort your data are worth it.  The longer you put off organizing your data, the more unorganized your database will become and it will be more difficult to manage it at all — wasting years of valuable information.

As discussed earlier in the week if your message overuses data or doesn’t use the person’s information properly that it can actually hurt your response rates.  Therefore, having a clean, organized database is imperative to seeing the desired results from personalized marketing.

In order to turn your data into valuable information you must segment your database into smaller subgroups of people with similar likes, buying preferences and demographics.  Once you segment your target audience into more manageable subgroups, you will find that you are able to create more personalized messages based on each of your smaller target audiences.

Timothy Freeman
President
Print & Graphic Communications Association