Personalized marketing can be incorporated throughout all of your communication elements – be it print, email, web or mobile – if you have an up-to-date database, you can segment your audience and create messages that are most likely going to entice your audience to respond to your communication.

Messages that are tailored to the interests of your target audience and include the recipient’s name are more likely to see responses.  In fact, a static direct mail piece will see approximately 2-3 percent response rate, whereas a personalized piece can see anywhere between double that to 15 times that percentage according to a recent DARE Study.

While including the person’s name is important and helpful to include in your mailing, personalized messages are more than simply a name in an email or on a direct mail piece, personalized marketing is about creating individualized content.

Creating offers that are more likely to elicit a response from the recipient helps to reduce marketing ‘waste’ or marketing messages that are completely irrelevant to a certain portion of your audience. By reducing this type of waste, you’re reducing the overall cost of your marketing campaign and, because of the relevancy of the messages you do send to a specific segment of your audience, there is an increase in the number of people who respond to your message.

No longer are consumers satisfied with generic, mass messages that may or may not pertain to their interests – they expect brands to conform to their needs.  Because of this, every touch point you have with your customer is extremely valuable and it is also very important to collect, analyze and properly develop customer-centric messages from the data you collect.

Timothy Freeman
President
Print & Graphic Communications Association