Personalisation In E-mail & direct mail Marketing

What is personalisation in marketing?

Personality and Individuality are considered to be the building blocks upon which human life has developed from. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato developed his belief on Individualism which states:

“a person taking part in society attempts to learn and discover what his or her own interests are on a personal basis, without a presumed following of the interests of a societal structure”

The belief describes how every person views society and their environment differently, which leads to everyone having different wants and needs. Marketing very much draws inspiration from Plato’s thoughts and tries to utilise the very fact that every person is unique. The belief of Individualism is used to justify a form of marketing where every individual receives a slightly different marketing experience, which should be tailored to their needs and wants.

Why personalisation is important to marketing

Marketing has a simple goal in its essence, which is to sell a service or a product to a customer. Inevitably marketing has become a tool which can grow customer loyalty, build brand recognition and grow an organisation’s status amongst other businesses. Due to all these applications for marketing organisations began trying to further improve their marketing to gain an edge over their competitors.

This led to marketing becoming personalised as marketing directors began to notice better return rates and more successful campaigns when personalising their marketing. Consumers responded better feeling as if their personal needs were being catered to better by organisations that had given them personalised marketing. This was done through mail, newsletters, brochures and other physical forms of communication.

Digital Marketing & Personalisation

In the modern day It’s not uncommon to receive an email that seems personal and thoughtful which includes details such as the name of the individual, their birthday and possibly suggestions and offers to purchase based on their recent searches. All large e-commerce retailers have adopted this method of marketing. Seeing what their customers placed in their baskets, searched for or bought recently helps large corporations generate personalised emails to their customers.

By being able to personalise the shopping experience for each customer e-commerce platforms are able to upsell their products and services, by directing the appropriate marketing to each customer. Cookies and data mining are two methods used to study consumer behaviour or patterns and to allow e-commerce platforms to gather basic information that the customer allows them to gather. This leads the consumer to experience a unique marketing and shopping experience which will be more enjoyed by them.

Duality of E-mail

Human interconnectivity has taken leaps and bounds in the past decade with email becoming the most common form of communication across the globe. With 4 billion users G-mail promises huge marketing opportunities.

(Source for average daily emails sent)

This however has had the adverse effect on marketing through email. With 105 billion emails being sent daily marketing becomes less effective as each email drowns out the previous. This has led to a decline in effectiveness of email marketing despite the steps taken to make digital marketing more personalised to each individual.

Where does Direct Mail fall into place?

With email marketing becoming less effective and more common, other channels of marketing have been becoming more effective. Methods that include but aren’t limited to physical in person advertising, social media marketing and direct mail. The effectiveness of these methods has increased due to the lack of saturation that they have had over the past years.

Direct mail marketing has the benefit of being underused on a large scale making every piece of direct mail more significant. Response rates to physical mail have been much higher than email response rates in the last few years. Marketing emails received a 3.1% click through rate in 2020, additionally direct mail has been shown to require 21% less cognitive effort to process as compared to email. The conclusion that can be further drawn from this is that direct mail is easier to process, making it more effective as consumers are more likely to take on the task of reading the mail.

Paperplanes’ direct mail offers the same high level of personalisation that is found in email marketing and putting that into physical mail. Taking into account the product suggestions, incentives (discounts & offers) and level of personalisation that email brings and combining it with the high response/return rate of direct mail leads to successful results. Particularly in customers who abandon their baskets online, customers who haven’t made a second purchase in a while or customers who were browsing digitally without making a purchase.

For any direct mail marketing inquires and and questions feel free to contact us. In the top right hand corner of your screen or if you scroll all the way down to find our contact information.