Personalized and Integrated Marketing Really Works!

"The Internet is introducing new channels to allow integrated campaigns and collect more customer data, making campaigns more successful. The integrated marketing campaign starts with mail."

— OnDemandJournal.com

According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), over 35% of people prefer to respond to direct mail by going online. Yet despite this powerful information, most direct mail campaigns do not direct prospects to respond by going online or even offer an online response as an option.

Motivate prospects to respond online

Forward thinking marketers are now taking advantage of a new method of integrated marketing that marries traditional direct mail to interactive online actions. Some are taking that approach a step further by utilizing a unique strategy of personalizing direct mail pieces to prospects and providing incentives that motivate logins to a Personal URL. Personalized URLs allows you to combine the power of direct mail with the benefits of the internet. By creating Personalized URLs for each customer, and giving each customer a unique online destination, you can convert more Direct Mail recipients into qualified prospects and lifetime customers. Marketing campaigns combining a direct mail offer that directs recipients to their own personalized URL have proven to give a huge competitive edge to marketers adopting this strategy

Below are 3 case studies from 2003 where prospects were contacted by a personalized piece of direct mail. Each prospect was asked to respond by going to a personalized website.

Case Studies

Personalized direct mail and website programs provide the best response rates.

CASESTUDY- Hewlett-Packard

"At Hewlett-Packard, we have proven the value of personalized direct mail in our own marketing endeavors. Our Educational Services unit offers training courses relating to a variety of products sold by HP. Earlier this year, we launched a personalized direct mail campaign that was designed to generate registrations for these training courses. The mailing was sent to 10,000 HP customers who had previously attended an HP training course. The mail piece referred to the recipient by name, mentioned the customer's previous purchase and described the course most relevant to that purchase. It also provided the dates of the class in the city closest to the recipient and included a photograph from that city. The mailer directed the recipient to a personalized website for more information and registration. Based on our previous experience with traditional direct mail, we estimated that the campaign would produce a 1 to 3 percent response rate
and would generate approximately $60,000 in revenues. Instead, this personalized campaign produced a 9.4 percent response rate and approximately $556,000 in new revenues."

HP 5982-1422ENUC, 09/2003

CASESTUDY - Pacific Northwest Bank (PNB)

Pacific Northwest Bank (PNB) - PNB is a regional commercial bank that recently acquired several community banks and needed to communicate account information to the customers of the acquired banks. PNB knew it was essential to begin building trust with these "new" customers by making the transition as smooth and painless as possible. Previously, in these situations, PNB had mailed customers a large booklet that outlined all changes in products and brands. Much of this information, however, was not relevant to any given recipient. This time, PNB designed a personalized, full-color booklet specific to each individual customer's accounts, terms and conditions. The content of each booklet was customized based on the banking relationship between the bank and that recipient. Typically, an acquiring bank will lose between 15 and 20 percent of the acquired bank's customers during a conversion process, but with the personalized booklets, PNB suffered no noticeable loss of customers. PNB estimates that the additional cost of the personalized booklets was approximately $250,000, but because of the increased customer retention, PNB expects to generate annual savings of between $3 million and $6 million.

HP 5982-1422ENUC, 09/2003

CASESTUDY - Carlson Companies, Inc.

Carlson Companies, Inc. (Carlson) - Carlson is a global leader in the marketing, travel and hospitality industries, with such well known brands as Radisson ® Hotels & Resorts, Country Inn and Suites by Carlson® and T.G.I. Friday's ® restaurants. Gold Points is a consumer loyalty/rewards program operated by a Carlson subsidiary, and Carlson wanted to migrate existing Gold Points customers to a new online extension of the program. To promote the online program, Carlson sent a traditional direct mail piece to part of its customer list and a personalized mailer to the rest. The personalized mailer included customized messaging, relevant color images, an image of the recipient's Gold Points membership card, and a personalized URL that the recipient could use to register at the online program site. The result? The personalized piece delivered a 250% higher response than the standard one. Even more importantly, the cost per response in the personalized portion of the campaign was less than half of that in the traditional portion.

HP 5982-1422ENUC, 09/2003