What the U.S. Mail taught me about effective personalization

This holiday season I was reminded of a conversation I had with a mailman some years ago…on Christmas Day, a mailman knocked on my door to deliver a package — surprised, I said “I didn’t know you worked on Christmas Day!?!” to which he replied “well, today we only deliver the packages with hand-written addresses on them…”. After a moment of reflection I challenged him — “what about big packages from Amazon that look like expensive gifts?” to which he smiled and confirmed “…nope…we’ll focus on what’s coming from family and friends…”

Got it — your ability to reach the target is super-dependent on how important the target — and others — considers your relationship to be. No matter how clever or sophisticated (read: expensive) your marketing efforts are, key gatekeepers are only too happy to put you in your place…and that’s the way it should be. Further, evidence that a personal relationship really works!

I think many marketers assume that “personalizing” their digital and database marketing efforts delivers real value to their customers and results in better loyalty (and sales!). OK, there’s plenty of evidence to support this — and as a consultant for digital personalization I’d better not “bite the hand…” — but the mailman reminded me of how unimportant commercial relationships are. What marketers can do, however, is focus insanely on delivering consistent value over time — and being open and transparent about their personalization efforts.

First, data and measurement: Those capturing preferences and building profiles only to better SPAM their target — and neglecting customer satisfaction KPIs — will increase cynical banner-blind behavior and reduced performance. Instead, we need to upweight customer satisfaction metrics in our personalization efforts (more than a smiley face on a website, btw) and move past the “mail a list ‘till it’s unprofitable” mentality to build valuable commercial relationships over time with desired audiences.

Next, creative and content: The “handwritten” value of personalization is in being transparent — let’s show our audiences (and their digital “mailmen” — their social graph) how we deliver value through the data we capture. Take Seattle-based Cloud Alchemist, a company so dedicated to transparency and personalization they participate in product education forums openly and, wait for it — they provide handwritten thank you notes on packing slips. And with an ‘arms-race’ of online content competing for our audience’s attention — let’s include content partners if they can help our audience more than we can, even if we lose the immediate sale. Sure beats spraying poor quality content around our digital ‘housefile’ of cookied web visitors in search of an ill-defined “brand engagement” metric — which itself is often poorly correlated to customer lifetime value.

Building valued relationships with our audiences over time, with transparent signals of personalization value — is likely to be noticed and prioritized for delivery to our target. This is a big challenge, but a challenge for which the right data-driven insights, analysis, and consistent execution is well set up to tackle. So, as we move past the holidays and into resolution-land, I tell this story a call to action to all of us — “keep it personal” does not mean finding better ways to SPAM our customers, or do gimmicky personalization (the dear ‘firstname’ on the email that can increase response AND complaints) it means finding the best way to get audiences to prioritize our communications right after that Christmas gift from dear old dad…that arrived on Christmas Day…