In marketing, empathy equals response and response equals dollars. One way of building empathy is by reflecting targets’ interests or emotional touch points in messages aimed at them.
Creating empathy often takes a subtle hand. Consider a recent fundraising letter for the Institute for Shipboard Education. An outsider viewing it may gloss over a photo of a ship in the upper right-hand corner. But someone who has sailed with the Institute’s Semester at Sea program will have a jolt of recognition, as the ship in the photo is one on which the participant has journeyed.
“In the letter we reference the voyage they took,” says Brett Jones, vice president of fundraising at DMW Direct, which designed the new mail package. “If they took multiple voyages, we reference the first. Our assumption is [the first experience] would have had such an impact that it would have been the one that hearkened back to their emotions.”
That’s just one of several variables based target data incorporated into a newly designed mail package the Institute is using. Each letter is personalized, and the copy is varied based on whether the recipient is a program alumnus, the parent of an alumnus, or an unaffiliated donor who supports the Institute’s mission. For instance, the lead sentence to an alumnus references the voyage’s date and the ship, and the letter includes an appeal to share the experience.
The ask ladder is personalized as well. Three listed dollar amounts are based on a recipient’s previous donation history, with the middle one, which is slightly higher than the target’s last gift, circled with the notation “This amount would really help!”
The Institute for Shipboard Education’s fall 2010 campaign—the first one to incorporate the new mail piece—followed the initial mid-September letter effort with an e-mail reminder two weeks later.
The organization has linked e-mail addresses to 37% of its 40,000 donor base. That effort featured a little less customization: The salutation was personalized, and those in a test group who were offered a luggage tag premium offer (one included in the package, a second one sent to donors who went online to contribute) had that offer reinforced in one of the images.
A Second Goal
So why do an e-mail campaign at all, given the coverage issues and the less tailored effort? Because e-mail was key to furthering a second goal of the organization, moving its donor base into making online contributions. While the mail piece included a link to the Institute’s Web site, DMW Direct anticipated that a link in an e-mail would be much more effective in driving donations online.
Personalization was back in force with a second mail package sent to donors four weeks after the e-mail. The copy in the second letter reflects the first, with the same customization points.
Tugging on heartstrings works. The fall 2010 campaign yielded a 17% revenue uptick from the previous year’s effort, which had been little more than an undifferentiated, mission-oriented mail piece.
The multiple touches paid off as well. Despite having e-mail addresses for just over one-third of the targets, 70% of the gifts—and 78% of the revenue—came from donors who had received all three communications. And surprisingly enough, 9% of the online revenue was from people who only received the direct mail packages.
In years past, data feeding into multichannel campaigns could be limited to demographic and transaction information, with perhaps some psychographic attributes added in the mix. Come 2011, however, a truly integrated multichannel campaign will take online behavior into account as well. As social networks grab an increasing amount of consumers’ attention, marketers are starting to figure out how to capture this type of information on a personally identifiable level.
Increasingly, these efforts center around using e-mail to push signup in social networks such as Facebook. This not only drives engagement with a brand but helps link an e-mail address with the network’s aggregated data, allowing marketers additional opportunities for segmentation and targeting, according to Shannon Aronson, senior director of the strategic and analytics consulting group at Epsilon.
Lizard Learnings
Pepsi’s Sobe brand is attempting to achieve this through its work with Epsilon. Recipients of Sobe’s The Lizard Tales e-newsletter are encouraged to interact with the brand’s Facebook page, where they can comment on various products, learn about sponsored live events and even—provided they “like” the brand—vote on various photographs of potential Lizards of the Week, such as lizard tattoos or lizard snow sculptures.
By analyzing how consumers interact with the brand through Facebook’s statistics package, Sobe gets a handle on which types of content consumers respond to. The company takes pains to freshen content shared between its newsletter and Facebook page for each audience.
There are limitations to social media personalization, however. While the newsletter is customizable based on recipient information, Facebook’s customization is trigger primarily on geographic data, says Aronson.
“But the great thing is when you have people who are in e-mail and social and mobile programs, you can get more targeted in how you communicate with them,” she adds.
What’s even better is the channels this Sobe campaign is using are exactly the ones most commonly consumed by its Generation Y demographic base, Aronson adds.
There is a caveat to all this: The rush to do multi-channel communication should not trump a basic nicety: Don’t over-saturate targets with messages. And be sensitive to when they indicate they don’t want to be communicated through certain channels – especially at the beginning of a new relationship.
“It is good marketing to study the customer and apply that [learning] in your communication,” says Dave Frankland, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “If someone hasn’t responded to 10, 15, 30 e-mails, or direct mail, maybe it’s time to start testing something else.”
Frankland notes that channel and frequency preferences may also be based on the type of information being sent. While marketing messages from a bank, for instance, may be desired only through e-mail or direct mail statement stuffers, information such as credit card use, or a balance hitting a certain level, might be more appropriate for a text message.
There are few shortcuts to determining this aside from either asking a target directly, or testing. Frankland cites an airline which sends everything for the first three months of a relationship, and then asks consumers what they want to receive, and whether they want to ratchet communication levels up or down. “The goal is to cut off people saying ‘stop’,” he says. Using this method “We’ve seen increases in response rates and open and click rates, and reductions in opt outs.”
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