From segmented to fully personalized coupons that arrive in your mailbox with a “just for you” inscription, personalized marketing has become a new trend. When marketers use personalized pieces, they use a higher level of complexity with more variable pictures and images, more variable texts or blocks, more dynamic compositions.

Almost two-thirds of today’s marketing campaigns are targeted, either segmented or fully personalized. Understand what it means for you and your brand. This simply means that when you are sending your direct mail you are competing with marketers who are speaking to the prospects on a more personalized level than you are.

If some or even all your competitors are using personalized marketing strategies and you are not, you are most likely to face some low numbers. You need to create a personalized campaign with customers and prospects from the word go.

How to Get Started

• Personalize by name – always use the receiver’s name. use it in a creative way and integrate it into the mail’s design. This makes it eye-catching and interesting.
• Target a single simple variable – for new businesses or businesses in new locations it is advisable to add a map of where your branch is. It also helps to target the mail by gender and ZIP code.
• Strengthen Your Marketing Database – a business can simply do this by buying variables like household income and home ownership for names of those you already have. This increases your database which will, in turn, boost the effectiveness of marketing.

Some marketers are still contemplating whether or not they want to dive into this new trend. Personalized marketing has been around for a while now and marketers have been using it for a long time. There are a couple of categories that will help you understand your customer communications in marketing campaigns.

Personalized marketing helps your brand stand out. Using the above methods will help you be able to manage your marketing and change it accordingly to ride this new and appealing marketing trend.

Keeping ahead of the competition is always at the center of any marketing team’s agenda. Focusing on your customer has proven to always be effective and creating that one on one relationship will give an edge over all your competitors. You should, however, be careful not to send the wrong message. Understand your customer base and understand who prefers personalized messages and who doesn’t in order not to lose any customers.