Is Getting Personal Really A Bad Thing? Well Certainly Not When It Comes To Your Customer Communications

Originally featured on bakergoodchild.co.uk

The missing piece to the puzzle

In an age where consumers are seeing more advertisements than ever before, getting your message to be relevant, within budget and engaging can often seem to marketeers like a puzzle. Personalisation may just be the missing piece in that puzzle, to help you deliver a strong message to your audience.

Customers expect to be treated as individuals. They want you to understand their preferences. Communicating with them through the right channel, at the right time, with the right message will help increase customer retention, enhance your brands reputation, and ultimately determine the success of your activity.

With complex consumer data being so accessible to marketeers, there really is no excuse to communicate with a ‘one size fit’s all’ message. Instead, by opting for hyper-personalised, targeted messaging you’re almost certain to see an uplift in response rates. Targeting your customers in this way enforces their importance to your organisation and will reward you with customer loyalty.

Personalisation in Direct Mail

In the context of Direct Mail, personalisation has historically been perceived as an expensive bolt-on to conventional generic approach. In 2023 this perception is fortunately an outdated stereotype. Advances in high-speed colour inkjet technology have made personalised Direct Mail more accessible to all. The ability to output completely variable creatives, means that you can communicate to all recipients with a message that’s bespoke to them, without having to worry about budgetary constraints.

The explosion of Programmatic Direct Mail in recent years, really does prove how effective personalised Direct Mail can be. By sending a targeted, timely communication based on a consumer browsing pattern; Programmatic Direct Mail has helped marketeers achieve a much higher return on investment when compared to a digital only approach.

We know that personalisation will increase the response from your Direct Mail campaigns, but it could also decrease the cost of your postage. Spending less and getting more back, may sound too good to be true, but it’s not. Thanks to Royal Mail’s Testing & Innovating incentive, if you can clearly demonstrate that you’re testing a new creative or format, you could be eligible to a 15% postage credit on Direct Mail and a 30% postage credit on Transactional Mail.

Showing supporters how important they are

A sector that can particularly benefit from highly personalised Direct Mail is the Charity Sector. Supporters are the life-blood of any charity, so it is important that they are all communicated to with a sensitive, appropriate approach. Varying donation amounts and telling supporters where their donations have helped are both examples of how powerful personalisation can be.

One charity who recognise how important it is to communicate with their supporters as individuals is Islamic Relief. Working with bakergoodchild for many years, Islamic Relief have recently produced a highly personalised Direct Mail piece to enhance their Ramadan activity.

Here’s what they had to say about data and personalisation.

At Islamic Relief, the relationship we have with our supporters is the most important one. We want them to know that they are at the centre of everything we do. Our award-winning Marketing team here work really hard to understand our audiences, becoming increasingly data-driven and innovative with how we communicate. We take extra care with complex data sets and thoroughly considered briefs, so we can uniquely apply the personalisation and variability that is right for each individual and their supporter journey with us. This has resulted in deeper levels of engagement across all platforms, allowing us to increase the quality of our data and utilise it better – all while trying to get our insanely creative ideas out of the third-floor boardroom!

Direct Marketing Manager – Islamic Relief

If you’d like to discuss any of the points above or wish to talk personalisation to a member of the team, please call 0800 612 1972 or email [email protected]