Just for You—New Trends in Personalized Marketing
September 26, 2008
It's Monday morning again and your blackberry is already having an endless seizure due to the mass of incoming e-mails. You quickly sift through them and each e-mail meets its fate: read or deleted. And let's face it—a majority of these dejected messages come from marketers.
By Karen Yi
E-mails are definitely the most cost and time efficient promotion medium, and they can easily be sent out en masse. But what's the benefit if they're simply being discarded? How can marketers stand out to consumers inundated with information when consumers are the bull’s eye mark for thousands of ads and marketers only have seconds to tickle a consumer's interest?
Renan Levy, president and COO of Intellidyn, says the new trend in electronic marketing is personalized marketing. "It's hard to develop acquisition by e-mail if it's not developed appropriately and targeted," he says. "There's a difference between clustering and personalization."
With an increasingly technology savvy consumer base, e-marketing needs to be taken to the next level. And that next step requires specifically directed marketing and an expansion of consumer databases.
"Historically, personalization was based on transactional history, based on purchase behavior," says Levy, "but it neglected to include information on customers." Although basing your customer databases on transactions, especially with the Internet, can be tricky. “Thirty percent of online shopping is gift giving and shopping for others," says Levy.
The trend of e-marketing is heading towards the utilization of dynamic content that more accurately analyzes consumer preference. At the beginning of the month, Intellidyn launched I-Distinct, a personalized marketing platform aimed at helping companies improve customer retention and loyalty. I-Distinct collects extensive data from customers—including attitudinal, lifestyle, values, passions and demographics—and then creates the consumer's marketing DNA. This DNA is matched with personalized content and objects, such as pictures or blurbs and then sent to the consumer by direct mail or e-mail.
I-Distinct goes beyond static consumer information and looks at attitudinal and behavioral information, something marketers may want to take note of.
A white paper by Renan Levy, titled "Taking Personalization to New Levels" finds that while "96% of organizations believe that personalization can improve marketing performance [according to Aberdeen], only 17% percent of surveyed companies are using personalization."
"Mass marketing is not working," says Levy. Companies need to respond to the failures of mass marketing in such a technologically rich society.
Next time your blackberry has a spastic spell, notice which e-mails draw your eye, are they just for you?
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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