The Ultimate Personalized Marketing
We all get direct mail with personalized fields that are supposed to make us think the company marketing to us knows what makes us tick. The same with email, personal URL's, and other messaging that we know deep down is really just mass-produced by a computer. In today's saturated media market where people's attention spans are split in five thousand different directions, companies have to do something really special to capture a customer's attention and make them believe an advertisement was made just for them. And that's exactly what Wilkes University recently did.
The small school in northeast Pennsylvania wanted to attract local incoming freshmen who typically had the credentials to attend college far away from home. Their marketing team decided to focus on a small number of students to personally bombard with advertising. Not brochures in the mail, calls to their house, or personal websites like a lot of colleges do; Wilkes bought billboard space, radio spots, and TV commercials to say things like "Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)"
Imagine being Nicole Pollock and driving to school one day, seeing that billboard for the first time. Not only did the campaign convince a number of the targeted students to apply to Wilkes, it created interest among their classmates and the rest of their local community. Obviously the campaign isn't scalable for most large companies, but the same principles apply to any kind of marketing. That feeling Nicole or any of the other students had when they saw that Wilkes University went out of its way to speak directly to them is the same feeling you should strive to create in every customer.
There are too many examples out there of "Dear firstname lastname, On xx/xx you purchased itemxyz, would you like to buy upsellxyz?" That may work better than using no personalization at all, but in today's world you have to create a deeper customer relationship. Take the time to find out what motivates your customers, take advantage of every touchpoint to learn about their needs, and don't let customers become a series of fields on a spreadsheet. Make every one feel like Nicole and her fellow prospective Wilkes University students.
This post seems to imply that today's sophisticated 1:1 print marketing is a mere commodity -- at risk of being glazed over by consumer eyeballs. But as someone who spends her work life watching this marketplace, if anything, it's taken increasingly seriously. As another poster said, even a single data point can result in a hugely successful campaign ... if it's the right data point. For example, the store opening campaigns for Panchero's restaraunts, which use mapping programs based on recipient addresses to inform recipients, "You are just [exact distance of the recipient's home] miles from the best burrito in [your town]." It works. Not because it's a gimmick, but because it makes the pitch relevant. Marketers should spend some time reading the case studies in the PODi case study archives or the "best in class" studies collected in the 1:1 print marketing primer, "1:1 (Personalized) Printing: Boosting Profits Through Relevance." Dropping your per-hiree acquisition cost from $8,000 to $90 isn't the result of a gimmick. It's the result of understanding what drives these applications, what makes them tick, and using those principles to your marketing advantage. Just because those programs are executed by a computer doesn't diminish their value. It's the rules behind them -- rules created by smart, savvy marketers who understand database marketing -- that matter.
Bizzare. I don't understand this campaign for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it could easily backfire. Very easily. You really have to play the privacy game in the US and this is treading a very thin line. I'd be pretty annoyed if I saw my name plastered everywhere, it's almost like a sort of identity theft.
Secondly, I can't understand why the college would blow $120,000 on an advertising campaign targeting seven prospective students (a staggering cost per acquisition of $17,143), no matter how smart they are. Unless your some local celeb and will attract a wave of admiring fans to also enroll, then I don't see how this can be a smart investment. I can think of better and more responsible ways to blow $120k on effective marketing.
In the case of a large company with millions of customers, sometimes just one piece of information can be useful for connecting on a one-to-one basis. I just received a "Happy Anniversary" email from Earthlink with a simple thank-you for being a customer--and no upsell or cross-sell. It was a nice reminder of why I've stuck with them for so many years.
This is a really cool idea. Although it's not scalable in this form, it does speak to making messages as personalized as possible - something that is increasingly available with the emergence of social media and Web 2.0 applications. The information that Wilkes was able to track down on Nicole Pollack can be attained on a broader scale using technologies that mine unstructured customer data. And goodness knows, more personal information than ever is available on customers - especially the millenial market that is more than happy to make their information available.