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| Print/Mail Center Management Tips |
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May 2008
Greetings!
The ultimate goal of personalized customer communications should be to treat each outbound document as if it were a portion of a conversation. When we talk with each other in business - and even if we text, instant message, write letters, or email - we accept the response from the other party and use it to craft our next communication. We take information we've gathered from the other party's previous message and use it to do things such as:
The Typical Customer Communication Strategy The majority of today's business-document and marketing material creators behave as if they are partly deaf. They may respond to what the crowd is loudly roaring, but they do not hear the soft murmurs from individuals. We have all probably generated letters, emails, notices, statement messages, and bill inserts that are "targeted to the individual customer". But for the most part, those communications are segmented mailings at best. They are not targeted to an individual, but rather to a demographic, psychographic, or geographic group of people who share similar characteristics. Some of the more advanced operations use some pretty sophisticated logic to decide what messages to include. This is particularly powerful for transpromo applications that imbed marketing messages directly into the business documents. These algorithms can decide which messages to include based upon regulatory requirements, white-space availability, final envelope weight, and what message the customer received in previous months. They can even vary the message based upon customer categories such as average billing amounts. I'm not saying this is a bad effort. The highly-capable tools that are available today are allowing companies to affordably communicate to their customers in a much more personal way. We've made great strides from the old days when the best we could do was split our print runs by zip code and include different envelope stuffers. However, there seem to be very few applications that can actually use specific customer feedback, either explicit or implied, to guide subsequent messages. The prevalent strategy is to create multiple variations, measure what approaches generate the greatest aggregate results, and then replicate that method for all the customers. This strategy hasn't changed much over the years, and neither have the results. Direct marketing campaigns are deemed to be successful at a 2% response rate. Getting Usable Customer Response Data is Difficult There are lots of reasons why marketers and corporate communications people don't consider individual customer responses in their document processes today:
Implementing a corporate-wide customer response- driven communications strategy isn't something I would recommend unless one has the luxury of designing an entire organization from the ground up. A brand-new company might be able to develop their sales, marketing, customer service, billing, and other functions to be entirely integrated from the beginning. For the rest of us, it's going to require a more gradual approach. It is certainly possible, however, to focus on only a single application. Here are some steps towards creating a response-driven document application:
Many of the benefits from developing a personal relationship with customers will be measurable by such things as less customer churn, more referrals, and fewer complaints. Not every customer will start buying more just because your company is communicating more effectively. Be sure to include a way to track results but don't limit your performance criteria to sales alone. A record of proven effectivness will help to secure corporate approval and funding for expanding the concept to other applications which in turn leads to the development of a true customer profile database.
Did you miss a newsletter? Sincerely,  Mike Porter
Print/Mail Consultants
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