The Direct Marketing Voice

Tag Archives: variable data

The “Auto-personalize Your Mailing” Mailing

Posté par Luis Paez le August 19, 2009 – 1:06 pm

dans Database Marketing, Direct Mail Marketing

I have to say, this is a clever idea. As a campaign to promote the ad agency Rapp, and their new name/image, Rapp sent out this interesting piece which consisted of a “box” which contained a button. That button, once you pushed it down, rubber stamped the recipient’s name onto the top of the letter. Oh, wait, I didn’t tell you… The “box” unfolds into a letter, which expresses their desire for their clients to be “personally involved” with the image. The reason that I am writing a blog post about this, is that it’s clever, but I think it could have been more clever in the right context. This campaign made no mention of the topic of personalization and variable data… but it should have.

Imagine how effective this campaign would have been if the goal was to explain the idea of personalization (and variable data) and how “it doesn’t have to be this hard”. It probably cost a bundle per piece especially with creating rubber stamps with all the recipients’ names on them, but could get across the notion that if a company is not tailoring their letters, direct mail, or any one -to-one printed collateral – as well as emails – that they really haven’t opened their eyes as to how easy it is to implement this type of communication. Looking at QuantumDigital’s platform, we make basic “address field” personalization available to all customers as part of our normal cost of doing business, but more advanced technology (right now you have to call in to request this) would create a personalized mailing which recognizes a recipients’ lifestyle, ethnic group – or maybe just their name in different places on the piece – has been setup for clients in the past.

So in essence, this is a great piece and concept, but has it’s limits because of the high cost per piece and the limited novelty factor. But if you’re in love with rubber stamps with every mailing, I’m not going to stop you

The “Auto-personalize Your Mailing” Mailing

Posté par Luis Paez le August 19, 2009 – 1:06 pm

dans Direct Mail Marketing

Managing Web Responses – When to use a PURL, GURL or CURL

Posté par Luis Paez le June 11, 2009 – 10:36 am

dans Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy

These days some marketers are talking about more advanced ways of using the web to track recipient responses. There are a few new ways of using a webpage to customize the user experience when your audience member visits your website, but before we go into those, I want to cover the standard forms of landing pages that most everyone is familiar with:

Company Website URL

This is the option that most small businesses are employing at present in their marketing. Let’s imagine an example company called “SallyCo”, and their website is www.sallyco.com – many businesses today are placing this “root” domain URL on their marketing pieces in addition to an email address and phone number to funnel response. The problem with doing this is two fold: 1) By your website server logs, you know that 100 people visited the site yesterday, but you don’t really know which of your audience members comprised this group. 2) There is probably not a link between your marketing piece creative/call to action and the company’s main website. There is room left here to customize and personalize the experience, which of course leads to increased conversions to customers.

GURL – Generic (or Generalized) URL

The next level of finesse is using GURLs. By this I do not mean it in the sense of empowered teenagers that you might have heard, instead these Generic URLs are also known as landing pages, or campaign pages. It is essentially a specific URL mentioned on a marketing piece that directs them to a page on a website created especially for that campaign. In this use, all recipients of the piece see the same content when they visit the website. Here’s an example of a GURL: www.sallyco.com/10percent it could also be in the form of a microsite www.10offAtSallyCo.com .

CURL – Customized URL

If you’ve already segmented your marketing database into different groups (frequent purchasers, groupings by state, or something similar) then essentially using a Customized URL would entail creating a separate landing page / webpage for each of your groups. If you were to segment by state for example, then maybe the URL would be www.sallyco.com/texas if your recipient was in Texas. If you have not segmented your overall list or database, then I would recommend taking “baby steps” in this direction. Doing an even split somehow is the best way to get your feet wet using this technique. Choose groupings that more or less leave you with even groups. Possibly it’s along a product line? If you were in the personal products business, then maybe Purchasers of Hairspray would be one group, and Purchasers of Lotion would be another group. The relevant CURLs would then be www.sallyco.com/campaign/hair , and www.sallyco.com/campaign/lotions – note that the “campaign” directory is optional, but probably something similar is recommended by your web developer so that if you ever remove those webpages, Google and web visitors can realize by the URL that it was meant as a temporary landing page.

PURL – Personalized URL

These are the coolest of the options just for the sheer impact it makes on a recipient. When I receive a marketing piece in the mail, or by email that has a URL that looks like www.sallyco.com/luispaez , this tells me that the company has invested a good amount of time and effort to tailoring their approach to me as an individual. If you’ve never received a piece in the mail like this, then imagine the impact of that type of creative. It’s similar to having a handwritten note sent to you in the mail – amongst all the generic messages, those that have a personalization component tend to stand out dramatically. In addition, using this approach guarantees that you’ll know on a person-to-person basis, who is responding to your ad. Whether you create actual webpages on your server, and just track them in your web logs – or you use a PURL provider to implement variable re-directs (so you only have to physicaly have one landing page), you’ll have the data you need to increase excitement and customer conversions.

All these options are available in different manners, and obviously, you could get very creative on how you implement any one of these. If you need more examples about how they have been used previously, you can ask your trusted marketing partner, or search for more articles on this and other blogs for implementation ideas. The two things to keep in mind as you use these are 1) is this piece raising the impact level and personalization of my message, and 2) Can I tell who, specifically, is visiting the site. If you can drill down to an individual level, then you or your sales team can follow up with the right verbage and their timing, will likely never be better.

Improving Audi’s (or any company’s) Service Communication

Posté par Luis Paez le April 22, 2009 – 2:48 pm

dans Marketing Strategy

Since Audi tends to be a high quality brand and their communications are typically very high quality as well, from a marketing perspective I was disappointed to see that they missed an opportunity to engage with me on a more personal level. Many companies struggle with their customer service communication, but even with those that execute well, there is room for improvement.

Below is a direct mail piece that I received on Monday from my local Audi dealer & service center. As an 8-page mailed booklet, I found it to stand out in the mail quite well, though the print quality was average. One thing that customer service departments can do better than other departments is to personalize their communications with customers – they have the best data quality and lists to mail to, as presumably their customers are active with them and update their information regularly so to obtain good service. This allows for communication & collateral that can be very personal and customized.

Here are my (unsolicited) suggestions:

Front - before

Front - After

On the front of the piece, I would have added two pieces of personalization: the recipient’s name & the name of the local dealer. Both pieces of data are in Audi’s CRM system, so why not include these on the piece? It definitely lets me know that they care enough to think of me specifically when they were creating the piece.

Page4 - before

Page4 - After

Though it’s a multi-page document, I took one of the center pages that also has a fold out flap featuring 5 coupons that I could redeem at my service center. My suggestions here are that they could have included specific information about my vehicle, letting me know that they are more aware than anyone the year and condition of my vehicle. Something that I did not put on the mockup is the opportunity to mention safety recalls. If there were any recent safety recalls that were outstanding on my vehicle, this would be a good opportunity to communicate this with a customer thus encouraging their visit.

Back - After

On the back of the piece, there are a couple of opportunities for excellence: First, and most obvious, simply writing a personal note to the recipient using variable data would have made this piece especially compelling. Second, integrating the name of an account manager, service advisor or another representative at Audi would be a good addition highlighting the team at the local dealer. Third, is an optional point but would be very good to see, that of using a personalized URL (pURL), that could be as simple as a one page mini-site where I could login and see basic information about my car and schedule an appointment. Making this URL personalized and variable printed on the piece would be the trick. Fourth, is the font on the address side. If you’ll notice on the “Before” image, the fonts used on the creative portion is slightly different than the font used for the address. Some printers have a hard time with this, but it’s definitely possible to resolve this detail and make all the fonts match.

Again, I do not mean to pick on Audi’s customer service department, and they are not one of QD’s customers, but it does serve as a good example of how an already high quality piece may be pushed up another notch. Anyone have other suggestions?