Your Customers are Not in Total Control

While today’s consumers may be more selective when considering which marketing messages they pay attention to, they are not completely autonomous when it comes to product desire.

You absolutely can inspire consumers to interact with your brand—your marketing messages just need to work harder and smarter. By delivering the right content, at the right time, in the right media, you can shift your marketing from an interruption to a welcomed message. So how do you nail this messaging? By listening of course, and acting against what you hear.

Shhh. The customer is speaking
Marketers are in business to sell desired products, and consumers tell you what they want all the time. They speak through transactions and interactions. Brands that listen up and communicate back with products and promotions understand the value of behavioral targeting.

Putting your cache of transactional data to use, you can optimize marketing spend across channels and across time. Data is king and marketers need to look beyond traditional formulas, recognizing the role of each channel and how they can be integrated to inspire desired consumer action. Bringing offline and online efforts together to create faster, more efficient and more personalized campaigns is where smart marketers are heading.

Get personal
While consumers willingly provide personal information (aka marketing gold) to online merchants, it often remains unused. According to a MyBuys/e-tailing survey, consumers are comfortable with personal information being used to make their shopping experience more relevant, though they feel that need isn’t being met.

The survey reported that 77% say they have made additional purchases when they have encountered personalized product recommendations online—more than half say they usually peruse those recommendations when offered. More than one-third (36 percent) indicated they award more loyalty to merchants who meet demand for true personalization in the shopping experience.”

If you create an intelligent (and responsible) recommendation system, the result can be fantastic. Marketing pieces filled with merchandise based on the individual’s past purchase behavior are proven to engage customers at a higher rate.

eBay has created millions of unique personalized URLs (PURLs) and variable-data printed them in direct mail pieces. Recipients are directed to personalized landing pages that serve up-to-the-minute deals on relevant products from eBay community members. These integrated, database-driven touches drive increases in site transactions during mailing windows.

Get smart
Don’t have a treasure chest of customer data? Not a problem. So long as you know customer names and past purchases, you can incite action and boost sales.

Highly personalized messages can engage your target audience. Combined with creative presentations, this data can cross-sell, bundle, and introduce new product offers to start you in the right direction of building long-lasting transactional relationships.

Bare Necessities, a premiere retailer of women’s brand name intimate apparel and men’s designer underwear, wanted to make the leap from an online-only brand to having a catalog presence. They used basic customer data to construct a catalog contact strategy, circulation plan, testing matrix, and order-curve forecast. The result of this effort was a direct-to-consumer offline catalog demand engine seamlessly integrated with a Web business.

Get local
Even with zero transactional history, you can still inspire consumer action with highly relevant messaging. A simple ZIP code and knowledge about your competition will do the trick.

AT&T is in a constant battle for customers, and the release of their new IPTV offering U-verse is no exception. Launching U-verse from market to market with limited product awareness, AT&T decided to take on the competition with an intelligent direct mail-focused contact stream.

They developed a straightforward chart on the outside of direct mail pieces that ink-jetted the local competitions’ pricing and features versus their own. This side-by-side comparison was variable-data printed market-by-market to let the recipients know that AT&T is the new sheriff in town. This personalization tactic proved highly motivating for prospects deciding to switch.

These are just a few ways that successful marketers are moving down the path to more personalized, relevant marketing communications. By listening to what your customers are saying through transactional data, and responding with intelligent communications, you can trigger an action and inspire customers to take greater notice in the future.

Jeff Haggin is CEO and president of Haggin Marketing.