Stop Wasting Your Time on Superficial Personalization

For more than two decades, experts have urged marketers to use personalized messages to boost the effectiveness of marketing communications. Many marketers have heeded this advice, and they are now using various technology tools to create personalized marketing messages in a variety of media and formats, including web pages, e-mail messages, and printed materials such as direct mail documents.

The most common way to personalize a marketing message is to include specific facts about the recipient in the message. Some examples would include the recipient's name, her job title, company affiliation, the industry in which she works, or information about a recent purchase.

The reality is, this type of explicit personalization no longer has much impact with potential buyers, largely because so many marketers are using similar personalization tactics. Two recent research projects have confirmed that explicit personalization alone has become an anemic tool for improving the effectiveness of marketing communications.

Earlier this year, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) conducted two concurrent surveys sponsored by Lyris. One of the surveys was directed at consumers, and it asked survey participants about the effectiveness of various marketing channels and tactics, how they prefer to engage with brands, and what influences their purchase decisions. You can obtain an executive summary of the EIU survey report here.

The major findings from the EIU consumer survey regarding personalization include the following:

• More than 70% of survey respondents said that the volume of personalized messages they receive has increased over the past five years.
• Seventy percent of the respondents said that many of the personalized messages they receive are annoying because the attempts at personalization are superficial.
• Sixty-three percent of respondents said that personalization is now so common that they have grown numb to it.
• Only 22% of respondents said that personalized offers are more likely to meet their needs than mass market offers.

Research by the CEB Marketing Leadership Council also shows that explicit personalization has lost much of its impact. In July of this year, CEB surveyed 1,500 consumers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia regarding how, why, and what they buy, and about their attitudes regarding the tactics brands use to engage them. One of the survey questions asked participants how they felt about some of the more common forms of explicit personalization. The table below shows how the survey participants responded.

The lesson here is that explicit personalization alone is not sufficient to make marketing messages more effective. The real key to improving the effectiveness of your marketing messages is to use what you know about your potential buyers to craft messages that will be more relevant and useful to those buyers. Relevance and usefulness (what Jay Baer calls "Youtility"), not mere personalization, are the real drivers of better marketing results.

This doesn't mean that you should stop personalizing marketing messages. It does mean that the personalization should be contextually appropriate (not just a gimmick) and that personalization shouldn't be the core component of your messaging strategy.

Out the door first with personalized debit

I love early morning trail runs! The best part? Serenity ... peace ... solitude. The worst part? Spiderwebs!

The point? There are great benefits to getting out the door first.

We have a client who offers instant issue debit cards. When we shopped their branches, the staff talked about the benefit of receiving the cards instantly ... which, to us bankers, is really cool. What they were missing was the true, differentiating benefit to the consumer. With the instant issue debit, they also offered card customization. Their members can have a debit card with a picture of their wedding day, a close up of their brat's mug or a shot of their refurbished hot rod ... whatever they want! Sure custom cards aren't "instant," but they are darn fast (a few days wait). The unique benefit is emotional.

Now, I don't know about your specific market (yet!), but in this market, while other banks have "free checking," no other competitor is marketing personalized debit cards. It's a unique product, it's tied to the almighty checking account and it has emotional appeal. It's the perfect storm! We rolled the print campaign out last week and will be focusing there for some time.

By getting out the door first with custom debit, I expect that this client will enjoy the serenity, peace and solitude of a less crowded competitive marketplace. And I'm sure it'll be better than running back in the crowded pack of "Free Checking."

Take care,

Eric

Personalization Alone Doesn't Create Relevance

Today's B2B marketers have more ways to reach out to customers and prospects than ever before.  Digital technologies have created new marketing channels and enabled marketing techniques that would have been impractical, if not completely impossible, only a few years ago.

But despite the new marketing channels and technology tools, most B2B marketers are finding it more difficult to capture the attention of potential buyers and create the kind of engagement that leads to new business.  Easy access to information makes B2B buyers less dependent on sellers than in the past, and our environment is filled with advertising and marketing clutter.

As I've written before, the real solution to overcoming these hurdles is to use marketing messages that are relevant to the problems and issues B2B buyers are facing.

The good news is that B2B marketers now have an array of tools to improve the relevance of marketing communications.  Personalization technologies can enable marketers to create marketing messages that are customized for individual prospects.  For example, marketers can use variable data printing to create direct mail pieces that are customized for each recipient.  Other personalization technologies make it possible to create customized e-mail messages and Web pages.

The capabilities of personalization technologies are impressive, but it's important to remember that personalization alone does not necessarily create relevance.  For some time, marketers have been personalizing marketing messages by including specific facts about the recipient - her name, job title, or company affiliation, for example - in the message.  I call this explicit personalization, and the reality is that explicit personalization alone won't make an irrelevant message relevant.

Effective marketing can be defined as getting the right offer in front of a potential buyer at the right time.  Information about a potential buyer - particularly the buyer's behavior - can be a powerful tool for determining what the right offer should be and when that offer should be presented.  When personal information is used this way, the result is a personalized, customized, and relevant marketing message.  What makes this kind of message different from one based only on explicit personalization is that the personalization is embodied in what the offer is and how it is presented, rather than in a collection of "facts" about the recipient.

All relevant marketing messages are in a very real sense personalized, but not all personalized messages are relevant.