THE QUESTION IS ENOUGH TO daunt any marketer: How do you come up with stories for dozens if not hundreds of personalized e-mail newsletter editions?

The answer is, you don’t. Instead, you should use a content database that can spit out the various versions with little human intervention.

These databases provide

Talk about organized.

Say, for instance, that you’re Ken S. Jones of Los Angeles. Today, Day-Timers, the Allentown, PA-based marketer of calendars and appointment books, has a catalog for you. And we mean, for you. If you’d received the spring catalog, for instance, you’d have discovered the following:

– A cover shot of a sample calendar page, featuring your name and a reference to your geographic area and lifestyle (“Remember Jones family picnic in Griffith Park”).

– A product shot of a pen with the initials KSJ on it.

– Instructions to turn to page 32 for those “pocket planners” you like in burgundy leather.

Or, if you were to shop at Daytimers.com this summer, you’d find the following:

– Customized pages of accessories, calendar refills and other goodies in the colors and sizes that you prefer.

– Order-tracking information, sent to you immediately via e-mail.

– Targeted e-mail messages about your preferred products (“save 20% on burgundy wallets!”).

– The ability to call a Day-Timers customer service rep to discuss your order seconds after logging off.

In other words, Day-Timers, the 53-year-old organizational-product specialist, is now developing its own corporate marketing equivalent of a very large and powerful Palm Pilot. Thanks to a three-year, $5 million-plus investment in online marketing and digital presses, the company is beginning to track and use its customer data as efficiently as Day-Timers customers track and record kids’ birthdays and shareholder meetings.

Whether online or in print, “we’re trying to personalize the whole shopping experience through the use of digital technology,” says Jerry Warmkessel, Day-Timers’ director of e-commerce.

Given Day-Timers’ market and customer base, one-to-one relationship building would seem to be a smart approach. Day-Timers – which divulges little about its customer base, sales or earnings – markets time-management products to business professionals, which are evenly split between male and female, and between home address and business address. Today, however, so do scores of time-management competitors, ranging from Franklin Covey (a $555 million company that markets seminars, calendars and software) to Microsoft (which markets Outlook calendar software.) The National Association of Professional Organizers, for instance, currently numbers 1,250 members, growing at 20% yearly, according to president Linda Rothschild.

Meanwhile, paper planners – Day-Timers’ core product line – are a tougher sell than they used to be. In the ’80s, every businesslike yuppie toted the ubiquitous Filofax or other leather-bound calendar; today, most of those same professionals carry electronic organizers or other wireless assistants.

“I see a lot of my clients moving in that direction,” says Stephanie Denton, president of Cincinnati-based organizational consultancy Denton &. Co. “People are working from multiple locations, and they find technology is more portable. And in the last five or 10 years, there’s been more information coming at you so fast from so many directions. It’s a lot to coordinate in a paper planner.”

And some competing digital products are even free. The Internet site AnyDay.com, for instance, not only offers free online personal calendars, but enables members to share calendar information with one another. “There’s nothing wrong with paper planning,” says spokesperson Jim McManus, referring to Day-Timers’ core product, “but we see there’s a lot more that can be done by using the Internet. You can share information, you can get e-mail reminders, you can do event planning. It’s not a static document that lives in your pocketbook.” The 9-month-old company, based in Cambridge, MA, has already signed on 2 million members, he says.

Given the competition, it’s no surprise Day-Timers won’t say whether its core customer base is on the decline. (Day-Timers is also owned by Fortune 100 conglomerate Fortune Brands, parent of Jim Beam and Titleist golf products, which does not break out sales or earnings for its divisions.) What the company will say, though, is that its one-to-one marketing efforts have begun to pay off.

In fact, if you’ve ever talked to anyone with a new Palm Pilot, you have a good sense of what it’s like to hear David Christensen, vice president of direct marketing, gush about Day-Timers’ new technology. The combination of digital presses and improved Internet marketing, he says, not only has helped the firm better understand its customers, but to better cross-sell and upsell them.

For instance, he says, catalog response jumped noticeably last fall when Day-Timers began rolling out targeted messages and personalized data on its catalogs. Targeted customer data also has boosted Web sales, he says. Daytimers.com, launched in 1996 and revamped in 1997 and 1999, has doubled business annually, and now makes up more than 5% of Day-Timers’ sales. Thanks to e-mail targeting, those Web customers typically spend 10% to 15% more than catalog shoppers. And each Web order, Christensen points out, saves Day-Timers money over a traditional catalog sale. “The cost of the electronic sale is virtually zero,” says Christensen. “The benefits just keep getting better.”

As a result, Day-Timers, like many DMers, is gunning for even more Internet business. Each catalog now carries prominent Web site logos, and order takers now ask customers to supply e-mail addresses as well as geographic ones. Any customer who volunteers a dot-com receives a monthly targeted message, as well as Day-Timers’ monthly newsletter E-Talk, with tips on time management and Day-Timers products. The click-through rate, Porter says, has recently doubled to about 10%, because of improved message targeting.

At this point, more than half of Day-Timers’ customers, whether catalog or online shoppers, now receive some kind of e-contact from Day-Timers. The opt-out rate, he says, is less than a half percent. “The percentage of customers we e-mail has doubled consistently year after year,” he says. “It’s currently growing at a 10% clip each month.”

And the more it grows the better Day-Timers likes it. Not only does the Web offer a low cost of sale, it also offers a low cost of customer knowledge. Say Janet Jones orders a leather binder online. For pennies, Day-Timers can target her with an e-mail advertising a matching pen set. If she clicks through, her next catalog might direct her to pen collections on page 12.

“E-mail allows you to test a lot of strategies in a relatively low-cost environment, to see what types of upsells or cross-sells may work best,” says Christensen. “We’re then able to take that information and roll it out to the catalog. What we’re seeing is very encouraging.”

Observers also seem encouraged. The company’s one-to-one strategy benefits both Day-Timers and the customer, says Denton. By using personalized and targeted messages, “the company doesn’t waste money advertising burgundy leather to someone who’s not interested in that,” she says. “And the customer doesn’t have to search for what she wants.”

For Day-Timers, such strategic marketing was a long time coming. Even though the company has been selling direct for more than a half century (retail products were introduced only five years ago), few of its efforts were targeted. In its semiannual catalog mailings, Day-Timers usually produced only four to five different catalog versions, based loosely on customer demographic and purchase history.

“We might have featured special offers in some books for free shipping or 20% off, but the catalogs were not personalized to the customer,” says Porter.

That’s not to say, though, that Day-Timers didn’t have a detailed customer database. “Day-Timers did an excellent job in collecting variables on the consumer,” Porter says. Given its fairly limited product line and high customer renewal (customer retention is about 75%, Christensen says), Day-Timers well knew that Customer A preferred digest-size planners and managed a home office, while Customer B was a longtime corporate veteran with a preference for expensive black leather.

The company, however, couldn’t afford to exploit that rich customer data in the mail. Sending pocket-planner catalogs to Customer A and high-end leather offers to Customer B, says Christensen, “was cost-prohibitive to think about.”

Digital technology, though, changed that. A year ago, Day-Timers began working with its catalog printer, Quebec-based World Color, to output catalogs directly from customer information. By linking its database to the printer, Day-Timers could produce catalogs that featured not only customer name and lifestyle information, but purchase history as well (as in, “See page 32 for burgundy accessories”).

Meanwhile, Day-Timers installed four digital presses last year (nicknamed Thelma, Bubba, Junior and Ellie May) to personalize the product itself. The presses – described by Christensen as a “very expensive and very strategic business decision” – feed customer data directly onto Day-Timers’ calendars.

Previously, Day-Timers printed generic calendars only, using standard web presses. Customers who wanted to include, say, birthdays and anniversaries, paid an $8 premium on the calendar price, since Day-Timers had to manually input and print “Remember Charlie’s graduation.” Today, customers who want personalized pages now input the information themselves, directly onto the Daytimers.com Web site. Day-Timers then links its presses directly to the Web site data to output the personalized calendars.

As a result, the company now offers calendar personalization free, as an incentive to get calendar customers to shop the Web site. In the past, says Christensen, a minority of customers ordered the personal pages. Since offering the incentive last fall, he says, “we’ve seen an increase, though it’s too soon to tell.”

Meanwhile, Day-Timers has upped its investment in the Web site itself. This summer, the company plans to merge catalog and Web purchase data in order to personalize each customer’s Web experience. That means, for instance, that Customer A, who prefers pocket planners, will see those assortments and accessories when she logs onto Daytimers.com, regardless of whether she’s previously purchased by phone, mail or Web. She’ll also get automatic shipping information via e-mail. And because customer-service reps will link directly to both Web and catalog data, she’ll be able to call Day-Timers immediately about online orders.

In the end, though, Day-Timers still faces an interesting paradox. With its digital presses and one-to-one e-marketing, Day-Timers is as fully wired as any organizational geek. At the same time, its core customer is still the paper-planner advocate (although Day-Timers also sells some software and Palm Pilots). Can all that database marketing help Day-Timers hang on to its increasingly fickle customer base – and convert new Day-Timers advocates?

It couldn’t hurt. After all, this author recently spent an hour hearing a friend extol the virtues of his new paper planner (albeit, one from Franklin Covey).

“When people get committed to using one sort of planner, they are loyal to it,” says Rothschild, who owns a Manhattan organizational consultancy.

“Updating from paper to computer calendars will potentially appeal to a lot of people. But not everybody has jumped onto the technology bandwagon. We work with people all the time who are signing on to paper planners.”

DAY-TIMERS TEAMS UP WITH ARIBA AND INTELISYS TO FIND ONLINE PROSPECTS Having used its Web skills to track customer data, Day-Timers recently took the next step in Internet marketing: Tracking customers themselves.

To find B-to-B prospects on the Web, for instance, the calendar company last year joined with Ariba and Intelisys, two “e-procurement” software companies that link vendors to corporate purchasing agents. The deal gives Day-Timers access to purchasing agents at 20% of Fortune 500 companies, according to David Christensen, Day-Timers’ vice president of direct marketing. That means agents who use the software to search for time-management products will now receive a Day-Timers offer.

“This gives us access to the corporate marketplace, where now we have almost a captive audience of purchasing agents,” says Jerry Warmkessel, Day-Timers’ director of e-commerce. Although Christensen won’t reveal how many corporate customers have signed on through Ariba and Intelisys, “the early results,” he says, “are encouraging.”

To recruit Web consumers, meanwhile, Day-Timers joined the push to online calendars. Late last year, the company sold its online division, Day-Timer Digital, to Quaartz Inc., an Internet company that creates interactive Web calendars with sports schedules, movie listings and other events. Quaartz then set up a calendar site on Daytimer.com, enabling browsers to create free online calendar pages that list everything from a nephew’s birthday to the next Red Sox game.

In the past six months, about 40,000 to 50,000 browsers signed on for the calendar service, Christensen says. The only hitch: Day-Timers can’t access the customer data, since Quaartz owns the calendar system. Fortunately, though, “a high percentage” of those calendar users have opted in to receive e-mail messages from Day-Timers, Christensen says. The hope, of course, is that if customers like the free online calendar, they’d like an off-line Day-Timers product even better.