Lifting Response with "Subtle Relevancy"

The average consumer receives 3,000 media messages a day, Christa Carone, chief marketing officer for Xerox Corp., told attendees at her keynote session at the DMA’s Digital Marketing Days conference in New York. Of those messages, a consumer pays attention to just 52 on average. But wait, the news gets even more dismal: Of those 52 messages, the typical consumer remembers just four.

You can improve the odds of your message being one of those four memorable messages by ensuring that it provides significant value to the consumer, Carone said. And to do that, you need to personalize it—not merely by addressing the recipient by name, but by tailoring the information within the message.

Yes, such one-to-one communication has long been the goal of marketers. But in her session, “Customer Conversations: Make a Brand Experience Personal with Subtle Relevancy,” Carone provided several accessible examples.

Best Friends Pet SuperCentres, an Australian pet-supplies retail chain, continuously compiled all point-of-contact data—from in-store purchases, visits to PURLs, and the like—from its 27,000 loyalty-club members. The data were analyzed and scored, and consumers were sent customized e-mails, localized by each retail store, with offers targeted according to type of pet and the customers’ life-cycle stage. Response was measured weekly. After 12 months, Best Friends reported double-digit growth in member value and store profitability, Carone said.

Closer to home, the State of Maine Office of Tourism tested the addition of a personalized pocket guide to its standard packet that it sends to Website visitors requesting travel information. In the test, site visitors requesting information were asked what sort of activities and which regions of the state they were most interested in. The 7,500 inquirers who were in the control group received the generic, 200-plus-page travel guide and a BRC; another 7,500 were sent the generic guide, a BRC, and a pocket travel guide personalized according to each consumer’s preferences. In essence, Carone said, the pocket guide was simply a version of the generic guide edited to include only the content that the inquirers had said they were more interested in.

Those who received the pocket guide had a 24% higher response rate than those who received only the generic information; what’s more, they spent 23% more in tourism dollars. And the cost of managing the data and producing the mini-guide was only an additional $1.28 per consumer, or $9.91 per packet, including postage, compared with $8.63 for the generic packet.

While technology certainly enabled the personalization of both organizations‘ marketing efforts, Carone warned against viewing it, and the various marketing media and channels themselves, as the ends, rather than the means. While it’s critical to understand where each new technology and medium fits in the overall marketing mix, she noted that “the true intrinsic value comes from the experience, not the technology.”