June 6, 2014
Practice What You Preach
Direct Mail Marketing is all about the data. Making the very best use of your client database and ensuring that it is used as successfully as possible. Our problem to solve was and will always be –
“How does a service provider speak to our own clients who themselves are producing direct mail to speak to their clients”?
Surely we need to think in the mind of our clients and try to introduce new concepts and ideas on how to get the most out of data in a clever way using basic techniques and visual clues and images across a variable platform.
Well the above image is one of our recent client communications. What did we do:
- We analysed our data we have (as most businesses) our core frequent clients, our less frequent clients and potential clients.
- We have a mixture of industry sectors that we specialise in, Arts, Conference and Exhibition, Not for Profit, NHS and Retail
- We needed to think about how our clients refer to their ‘Clients’, ‘Customers’ ‘Members’, ‘Patrons’, ‘Supporters’ etc.
- We looked at the way we talk to our clients and then thought about how our clients ‘talked’ to their clients.
- We split the data into account managers for current clients and provided a direct message to those clients from their account manager
- Potential and less frequent clients received a different message from our client services team, a male recipient receiving their communication with a friendly female contact, and female clients received their message from a friendly male contact.
Having thought through the data we then worked further on the data to produce different salutations to match images on the front to both get attention and also demonstrate that the data driven greeting is further enhanced with a visual image stimulus that corresponds to the text greeting.
Within the layered print, there are 10 salutation greetings specific to industry, 8 (excluding the address) variable fields for text, and 6 variable images each of these are driven by the data with a view to ‘talking’ to our clients in a way they are used to both being addressed themselves, but also how they would refer to and talk to their clients in turn.
How long did this take, to complete? Over a 2 week period from initial concept to despatch, the time taken was 3 working days split between other tasks.
We like to Practice What We Preach, and continue to demonstrate to our customers that Data Driven 1-2-1 marketing communication brings results.
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