Making personalisation more personal

In the olden days of direct marketing, maybe the 1980s, personalisation began and ended with putting a recipient’s name at the top of the letter and sprinkling it throughout.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

But today, personalisation must go much further. We have to take into consideration consumer behaviors and interests.The real key to personalisation is understanding your audience and providing relevant offers.

In fulfillment — whether it’s an e-commerce transaction or a request for event registration or a white paper download — the ability to use fulfillment to tease out the next level of interest is possible and it’s something we should all be aiming to do.

A truly personalised message contains relevant content for each individual recipient. Ideally, you take into account the recipient’s past interaction behaviours — whether that be pages browsed on a website, white papers downloaded, items purchased.

You should be able to leverage what a person’s online behaviour tells you. What the individual is interested in. Is it case studies, technical specifications, or something else?

Online behaviour gives you so much more insight than any sort of demographics. After all, it is based on actual movements.

Let’s use a security software company as an example, where a recipient has registered for an event.

Instead of just saying, “OK, here’s what you requested; call us if you’d like anything more”, the fulfillment registration information should give the registrant more offers.

Take the case of a person who registers for an event on ‘global security threats’. Here’s what you could do:

You could check the person’s web activity – maybe it indicates that he looked at information on how to encrypt the hard drive on a computer and also auditing employees for security.

Then, in fulfilment, you send this person the requested registration details. But you also send some teasers about the next webinars on encrypting hard drives and auditing employees for security.

In this way, you can tease out where that person is in the buying journey. Fulfillment becomes a vital link in the sales chain.