Personalising your marketing campaigns, including direct mail, can significantly impact your engagement and conversion rates. Our data tells us that personalisation can increase direct mail open rates by up to 18%! In many cases, this means more than 90% of people open a piece of direct mail and read what you have to say!
Many studies analyse the impact of personalisation across marketing as a whole. You might even already have some experience implementing personalisation, be this via your email newsletter or automated social media messages. If so, did you notice an impact on the open, response, and click-through rates when you personalised your messages rather than sending something generic?
Why have we asked about your own experiences?
Because, for all the studies promoting the virtues of personalisation, many others have found marketers are preparing to give up on personalisation in the coming years.
Let’s look at:
- The barriers businesses face when wanting to embrace personalisation.
- The reasons why many marketers are planning to give up on personalisation.
- What you can do to ensure personalisation works for you.
If marketers and businesses in your industry abandon personalisation in the coming years, that's a massive opportunity for you to capitalise!
What are the reasons businesses don’t use personalisation?
There are many reasons why businesses don’t use personalisation in their marketing.
Now, we’re going to discount those who aren’t fully aware of the potential impact of personalisation. There might even be business owners out there who don’t know what personalisation is!
However, among those who are familiar with personalisation, the following are common reasons for not taking advantage of it:
- Lack of resources.
- Budget restraints.
- Departmental conflicts in larger businesses.
- Lack of strategic foresight.
- Lack of integration between tools to ensure the correct formatting of data.
It’s not difficult to spot the problems here.
Businesses can’t seem to get out of their own way or are unwilling to dedicate the necessary time or resources to personalisation. Yet, customers are increasingly looking for customisations in their direct mail and other marketing communications they receive. They want to feel like what you’ve sent them is tailored specifically for them!
Those businesses who don’t personalise their direct mail due to what they believe to be a lack of resources soon won’t even have that many customers to worry about creating something tailored to their needs!
Why might businesses give up on personalisation?
In 2019, a report from Gartner for Marketers predicted that 80% of marketers and businesses would abandon personalisation by 2025.
That's a huge proportion of businesses! As we alluded to earlier, this shouldn't trigger you to think about doing the same. Instead, you should get set to use your personalised direct mail as a unique selling point of your business. You can brand yourself as a company that sends people direct mail 100% relevant to them, rather than giving every all 25,000 people on your distribution list the same thing!
What are the main reasons businesses are set to give up on personalisation?
According to the Gartner report, the main reason was the lack of return on investment.
We find that staggering! We can only assume most of the respondents were talking in a digital marketing context, having struggled with personalising things like pay per click and social media advertising.
However, when it comes to direct mail, we know that personalisation boosts open rates. Therefore, if you’re struggling to see returns, you probably need to look at things like your messaging and content rather than assuming personalisation is the problem!
The second significant reason businesses were turning their backs on personalisation?
Data.
Data is at the root of several concerns, which include:
- Data collection.
- Data protection and management, and compliance with things like GDPR.
- Integrating data within systems to use it effectively. As we saw earlier, this is also a barrier to personalisation, but it doesn’t have to be a hassle!
- Having "clean" and well-segmented data that you can easily use in marketing campaigns.
Are you thinking what we’re thinking?
None of these data issues is insurmountable! Businesses that are turning their backs on personalisation are admitting they didn't do a good enough job of planning their personalisation strategy in the first place.
Several people argue that personalisation is just another form of segmentation. That's undoubtedly true, but if you have a mailing list of 25,000 people, the chances are they aren't all going to fit perfectly into a handful of buyer personas that you create!
How can you ensure personalisation works for you?
Given the potential of personalisation, it is absolutely something that you should focus on as part of your direct mail campaigns. If you're not personalising your direct mail, then you're not sending direct mail but are undertaking a door drop marketing campaign instead. Personalising your direct mail will help you understand whether you're giving your customers what they want and give you a platform from which you can tweak your future campaigns for success.
Here are the actions you must take to ensure you’re making the most of personalisation:
Collecting and maintaining data
If you want to personalise your direct mail, you need to have the relevant data to make it happen.
Many people perceive data collection to be some sort of murky practice. However, the truth is that you're probably collecting much of the data you need as part of your regular business operations. Admittedly, data collection is more challenging if you don't operate online or send things to people. Still, you can always grow your database by advertising what you'll send to people. If anything else, a database you build offline will generate a better return on investment in the long term as you will engage people from the off.
The most significant thing you need to keep on top of is permission to contact and data deletion requests.
Otherwise, you’ll get all the data you need from your customers whenever they buy something or make an enquiry!
Speaking to your customers, and not at them
You must see personalisation as an opportunity to build a relationship with your customers, not just talk "at" them.
As such, you shouldn’t use your personalised direct mail or other marketing solely to tell your customers all about you. You need to ask them what they think and invite them to participate in your growth as a brand.
Not only with this engage your audience, but you'll learn more about them, which will help you to make your direct mail even more relevant to them. In turn, this will show your customers you're listening and engage them even further!
Cleaning up your databases
It’s easy to spend thousands of pounds a year on personalised marketing that people don’t engage with.
There are two things you need to do here:
- Ensure that when people request you don’t contact them that you fulfil this. Not only does this save you money, but it’ll keep you on the right side of things like GDPR, too.
- As well as tracking engagement and conversions (more on that in a moment), use tracking to identify customers that never respond to your campaigns. You can then send them a final message saying you won't bother them again or immediately remove them from your mailing list.
Tracking your campaigns to ensure they’re succeeding
Many people believe that tracking the success of online campaigns is far easier than for things like direct mail. It's possibly more straightforward as most of the elements you need are already in place. Still, in reality, it is just as easy to track a direct mail campaign.
How you do it depends on what you're looking to achieve from your personalised campaign. All you need to do is use a specific phone number, website address, or QR code to track responses. You can even use different website addresses, for example, for different audience segments, or even assign a URL “code” unique to each customer.
If you want to drive people to a physical location, you can use a promotion code or an initiative like a loyalty program to track your marketing effectiveness.
Remember, there are so many elements to your campaign that it is unlikely personalisation is the problem!
You can do lots of things to make sure you take advantage of the opportunities personalised marketing can deliver.
However, there are so many elements to putting together a successful campaign! As such, if you're experiencing problems, it's unlikely that it is personalisation specifically causing them. Unless, of course, your only personalisation is using the recipient's name, and you're not actually tailoring your marketing content to their needs!
If businesses are turning their backs on personalisation, it’s your chance to take advantage
If 80% of businesses really do plan to turn their backs on personalisation in the next few years, you absolutely should not swim with the tide on this one.
Continuing to create personalised campaigns will give you a unique selling point. Personalised campaigns can help you stand out on the doormat in a world of what will become increasingly generic and uninteresting mail!
