The Legend of How “Because” Ruined a Mailing
There’s an old story in direct marketing circles about a single word that caused a firestorm of controversy with recipients of a direct mail travel campaign to known travelers to Germany.
The word? “Because.”
While the story may be apocryphal, it has implications for a discussion taking place in e-mail marketing about the effects of personalization.
The tale goes like this: A marketer of travel services sent a prospect mailing to known travelers to Germany that contained the words: “If you travel to Germany.” According to legend, the mailing worked like gangbusters.
A subsequent mailing that used the phrase “because you travel to Germany” not only flopped, it drew complaints from recipients.
The lesson: Personalized offers work. Needless displays of familiarity backfire.
Now comes a study from the University of Illinois on e-mail personalization drawing the very conclusion our possibly mythical travel marketers drew with their Germany-oriented mailing.
According to the study’s authors, some degree of personalization in e-mails, such as addressing people by name, helped boost response. However, e-mails that displayed too much knowledge about the recipients, such as one that said, “As an action movie fan, we thought you’d be interested in joining others in San Francisco” suppressed response.
Tiffany Barnett White, a University of Illinois marketing professor who headed the study, said more research is needed to gauge whether marketers should consider abandoning personalization and just focus on offering value, according to an article posted on the University of Illinois College of Business Web site.
“I can’t make any statements now about whether firms should just not spend money on personalization. But I think the big takeaway from this research is that personalization might not matter and it may actually hurt,” White said.
But it’s not the personalized use of data that hurt the San Francisco action movie mailing. It was the clumsy creative approach.
Amazon uses the personalized approach all the time, but its personalized e-mails say: “We’ve noticed people who bought Book A have also purchased Book B.” Notice Amazon—a company that could probably profile its customers better than their mothers ever could—doesn’t cross any familiarity boundaries with its e-mail offers.
Moreover, how personalized an offer can be will depend upon the relationship between the prospect or customer and the marketer. No doubt, if the travelers to Germany above had received the mailing from the agent through which they booked their last trip, the reaction would have been quite different.
The lesson: By all means marketers should strive toward more personalized e-mail efforts. They just shouldn’t pretend they’re pals with the recipients of their campaigns.
