We’re getting personal

In the circus of content that we absorb every day, it is difficult to cut through the noise and reach your audience effectively. The world we live in is fast paced, so it is easy for your message to get lost amongst the hive of activity or fall into the ‘unread’ pile. However, we have the answer…it is time to get personal. At Dragonfly, we are the biggest advocates for a bit of personalisation. It is easy to execute, it makes you stand out, and costs so much less than you may think.

In 2018, the introduction of GDPR changed the way we market ourselves and posed new barriers to overcome that we have never seen before. The risk of heavy fines and bad reputations made people nervous to use data to personalise their advertising. Even though that apprehension still exists, we are seeing far more organisations embrace the value of data. Under Legitimate Interest we can target and segment people that you believe have a genuine interest in your product or service, based on various factors such as, the purchase of a similar or related product or service.

Why personalise?

In a direct mail campaign, investing in some added personalisation makes a huge difference to your ROI. Personalised mail usually receives a 6.5% response rate and non-personalised mail receives a 2% response rate. Direct mail campaigns that include personalised element can expect an ROI increase of between 300% – 1000% i.e. 3x or 10x more return. The use of personalisation makes people feel valued because they know that personalising what they have received has taken time, money and effort and they are being addressed by the sender rather than being part of a bulk mailing. In the charity sector, the use of personalisation is key to make you stand out from the crowd, if people feel they are being spoken to on a personal level they will be more inclined to donate.

Despite personalisation being referred to as the holy grail of marketing, it is also important to not ‘over-do’ the personalisation, this can have a worse impact than not doing it at all. People can experience irritation or a sense of an invasion of their privacy. This is also why it is important to make sure your data is as clean and accurate as possible, especially when personalising!

Take people on a journey

Personalisation isn’t always putting their name on a letter. It can be less direct than that and even the smallest touches make people feel valued. For example, Spotify put together a ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist for each subscriber which is based around their most played songs and finding similar songs and artists. The idea behind this personalised playlist is not only to make the customer feel valued and giving them something extra, it is exposing them to new artists and new music. It’s been a huge success and highlights the benefits of doing something that goes above and beyond what your product or service offers.

The key benefits of personalisation are: it doesn’t cost much, it is easy to implement and it increases your ROI.

Contact us to discuss adding personalisation to your direct mail campaign.