The true essence of One-to-One marketing is its ability to be relevant to the recipient.
Yes, I admit to crow-barring an AC/DC reference in this post, but it kinda fits. When people think about One-to-One marketing communications, they too often think it is all about adding as many occurrences of the recipient’s name as possible thereby capturing her attention. Three years ago, the “gee-whiz” factor of the technology that enables this type of personalization may have made this true, today it ranks high on the ho-hum scale, and hits the trash can faster than you can say “Mary Sample” six times.The true essence of One-to-One is its ability to be relevant to the recipient. Human beings, with our seemingly endless ability to adapt to our environment, have responded to the deluge of information being thrown at us by developing an incredibly effective filtering system. We have the ability to assess and decide literally in milliseconds. At the core of this process is relevance (read: “what’s in this for me?”).
This acquired ability coupled with what a Harvard professor recently termed: The Human Anticipation Machine (as Seinfeld said about using the TV control: “we don’t care what’s on, we care what else is on”) presents a new and formidable challenge to marketers.
Relevance can come in many forms, and can be difficult to predict. Something that may not be relevant to you today, might be extremely so next week.
What’s a marketer to do?
Start with the WHO, and let that help determine the WHAT.
Many companies, whether they market to consumers, or B2B, are first discovering the enormous value of the data they collected as a mere by-product of conducting their business. Data mining has become common place and is increasingly being integrated into CRM systems. The same way Amazon displays: “people who purchased this Frisbee also enjoyed these sneakers” during the check out process, savvy marketers are combing their databases to uncover these types of product associations.
Once the associations are made, and the opportunities identified, digital technologies enable us to aggregate various offers, with demographically triggered images, colors and text in a single mail-stream.
Add a Purl response vehicle with dynamically created, personalized web pages (www.JaneSample.DeservesTheVeryBest.com), and you have positioned your campaign to get some attention and greatly increased your chances of coinciding with a perceived need.
Good selling!
Thanks to Guest blogger:
Bill Doehler
VP, Business Development
Consortium Companies
