Personalised direct marketing: tailoring campaigns to audiences
The days of ‘one size fits all’ mass marketing are long gone. Today’s customers want personalised direct marketing. According to Marigold’s 2024 European Consumer Trends Index, 78% of consumers are willing to engage with personalised messages.
However, in a saturated market, providing campaigns tailored to audiences is challenging for marketers. Read our guide on personalisation in marketing, which has actionable insights and strategies that resonate with target audiences, enhance engagement and drive conversions. Discover why data and technology like Paragon’s Smart_Cloud are essential to the mix.
An introduction to personalisation in marketing
Personalisation and individualisation in marketing are cut from the same cloth, but one is more powerful at delivering results.
Suppose you indulge your desire for a custom-made shirt in Jermyn Street, London, home to high-quality tailoring. A skilled tailor will greet you by title or name (personalisation), making you feel valued. But you’ll be even more pleased if they create a shirt that matches your specifications for colour, pattern and style (individualisation). Additionally, the encounter meets your expectations for the Jermyn Street brand.
Personalisation in direct marketing is no different.
Personalised direct marketing often starts with personalisation in subject lines and greetings. You can make the email’s content even more personal by calling the recipient ‘you’, but it’s still a mass-marketing exercise to elicit a response from many people simultaneously.
In contrast, individualised marketing addresses customers by name and caters to their interests, desires and preferences while making them feel unique. Individualisation can increase engagement with direct mail and advertising.
If you can master personalisation and individualisation and exceed your brand’s expectations, like the savvy tailor, you can improve CX while increasing engagement and ROI.
As Dan Hall, Proposition and Strategy Director at Paragon Marketing Services, explains: “Consumers want to feel aligned with the companies they engage with, and by identifying these values, you can establish an emotional connection, building a foundation of loyalty that extends beyond transactional relationships.”
Tailored campaign successfully repositions Hyundai
Achieving meaningful connections requires a balance of data, insight and technology, as Paragon's campaign for Hyundai’s KONA illustrates.
We used data and analytics to identify, target and connect with two audiences: physical direct mail, a poster and colouring book for hot prospect hand-raisers, and a more traditional mailing pack for older potential customers.
The campaign produced an email engagement rate of 65%, 437 KONA sales and £7 million in revenue. Read on.
Understanding your audience
Gathering actionable audience insights is vital to your marketing campaign strategy. Advanced analytics, surveys, social listening, and innovative technology to track performance are all essential in identifying prospects and delivering measurable outcomes.
Additionally, you must segment your audience based on demographics, behaviour and preferences, and build customer personas to tailor your messaging and ensure clients achieve their desired return on investment.
Paragon dedicates on-site teams to work on and manage large campaigns, helping us quickly respond to clients’ evolving needs and bringing specialists on board to ensure seamless delivery.
Greene King apps campaign intensifies engagement
The UK’s largest pub retailer and brewer, Greene King, saw a massive uptick in engagement after we created a rewards app for its dining brands.
We used our design, discovery, user experience and the latest beacon technology and data integration techniques to create the app, which offered customers deals based on location and proximity to participating venues. Venues could use the app to brand everything from offers to menus individually. Explore.
Leveraging technology for personalisation
A report by one of our partners, Salesforce, reveals that 73% of customers expect better personalisation through technology. Our capabilities, from data and AI to products and platforms, can help predict customer behaviour and preferences and provide the personalised touchpoints they expect to see.
One example is Paragon’s Smart_Cloud platform. It helps you create targeted, personalised and integrated marketing communications that enable clients to make better decisions and stay ahead of the competition.
As a single-source ecosystem, Smart_Cloud provides branded marketing technology, production and workflow solutions that feel part of your internal suite. You can also integrate automation tools like Salesforce within the platform to deliver personalised content like email automation and chatbots at scale.
Unlocking brand value with technology
The Paragon digital team unlocks value for brands through other technologies like CRM that help them implement global digital marketing transformation programmes focused on the customer experience. Our extensive understanding of data and insight and creative expertise deliver imaginative creative materials throughout the customer journey.
Our partners also provide powerful platforms that improve customers’ online experiences alongside our considerable technology expertise. For instance, Acquia’s open source digital experience platform can optimise your campaign strategies, while Apteco software makes your marketing more personal.
Strategies for personalised campaigns
Personalisation must segue into individualisation to deliver a meaningful experience wherever and whenever customers interact.
It’s less effective to send an amazingly produced, creative and personalised email saying ‘Hello Nimisha’ if Nimisha isn’t interested in your product or service. It’s much more compelling when you build on personalisation by using data to send individualised emails based on her known preferences, habits and trends.
Your marketing campaign strategy should include:
- Email marketing using dynamic content and personalised subject lines
- Social media personalisation, such as targeting ads based on user interests and behaviour
- Website personalisation, including dynamic content recommendations and user-specific landing pages
- Personalising for omnichannel experiences to ensure consistent and seamless personalisation across touchpoints
Donations to St John Ambulance rise by 38%
Lives can be lost in three minutes, but an ambulance takes eight minutes to arrive at an emergency. So, if St John Ambulance first responders get to a patient faster, it makes a critical difference.
A personalised St John Ambulance direct mail campaign, where we created fundraising door-drops with a zip tear to create urgency, led to a rise in the average donation from £21 to almost £29. Read on.
Maintaining a balance between personalisation and privacy
A must-have when you’re tailoring campaigns to your audience is an understanding of data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
However, it’s essential to tread a fine line between being on the ball and appearing ‘creepy’ and ‘stalkerish’ or you’ll lose the audience. Your marketing strategy should build trust by being transparent about data use and allow customers to control their personalisation settings.
Metrics for measuring success
Measurement, or lack of it, has always vexed businesses. As Unilever’s founder, Lord Leverhulme, famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half.”
Today, there’s no excuse for a wasted budget. Data-driven metrics, such as click-through rates, conversion rates and customer lifetime value, can help marketers measure their marketing campaign’s success with the target audience.
Even something as basic as A/B testing can help you formulate a personalised marketing campaign. For example, you could use it to compare a personalised email versus an individualised one and confirm that personalisation achieves a higher opening rate. Although you probably know the answer by now!
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