A mailing arrives from a company that wants to sell me B2B data. Fair enough, except …
1. The design bears not the slightest resemblance to the company’s website
2. The imagery in the brochure is perfectly designed to cheapen and discredit the company’s business (see Wieden & Kennedy’s blog for more detail)
3. I get two copies, one for each of the Directors, which is fair enough; the second copy has someone else’s company name in the address. Brilliant.
Jane Holmes, if you really are the head of this company, honestly, I can help.
Been working with the nice people at Whitewater on a campaign that we’re getting really excited about. There’s more on their blog here. It’s about finding more powerful ways to connect donors with the work they help to fund. Meanwhile, here’s a more conventional ‘thank you’ to Steve, Richard, Brad and Celia at Whitewater for the opportunity. Good luck to Nick and colleagues at SolarAid too.
A little research in recent days has unearthed some fantastic ideas and examples of where we could take data-driven personalisation. Most of the ideas are from the US, but there are some in Hong Kong and Australia too – here’s one of them from Eliot Harper. I would love to bring them to the UK. At the moment, some of the ideas are so far ahead of our practice in this country, that they’d be seen as gimmicks with no possible application by almost everyone. And that ‘almost’ is the encouraging part, because there are a couple of clients and agencies here that do understand. It’s good to see that there is a pathway to the future.
picture: Jan Tik
There’s an interesting exchange going on at LinkedIn about one-to-one personalised marketing.
This is the line from one of the US contributors that rocked me back in my chair:
“About 4 yrs ago I worked at a DM agency and every campaign included a personalized VDP print DMailing, a minisite with a trackable specific URL, followed by an eblast and finally another call to action printed 4pg brochure drawing them back to the website to buy the products.
I am now starting my own business and without even giving it any thought this is exactly my marketing plan…of course scaled down.”
And here I am in the UK looking at a grand total of 4 published case studies of work that looks like this – one of which, by the way, increased marketing ROI by more than 500%, and generated £1m in incremental profit, and won awards – and talking to lots of people who think it’s a good idea but aren’t doing it yet.
It’s time to catch up, there’s money to be made out there …
picture: greenishseal
Led a thoroughly enjoyable brainstorm session today. The starting point was to find ways of using data, personalisation, and variable digital printing, to maximise the value of customers of a new service www.which.co.uk/digitalstore, and as a result generate additional digital print output.
Lots of good ideas resulted. It took a while to realise that they were all data-based marketing ideas, entirely independent of the medium. It’s up to the customer to decide how they want the messages delivered. It’s up to us to give them the choice.
It’s a tough environment for a service provider that’s wedded to single channels.
