It’s no breaking news that email marketing commonly uses first name personalization to bump up conversion rates. Although it works, it’s not the best or most creative way to win at the personalization game.
What you might not know is direct mail can be personalized in virtually all the same ways and proves to be especially powerful in combination with email. Just as with email, marketing automation can be used to gather information and send mailers tailored to an individual’s interests and behavior; but the question is, what’s the best way to use it?
One of the major advantages of direct mail marketing with Poplar is the ability to get personal - beyond the same old name game. Poplar offers a variety of dynamic merge tags, similar to email, that allow you to creatively customize mailers based on three main categories: Recipient Information, Location, and Custom Data.
Getting personal is about more than just the technology, with the right knowledge and action, personalization can yield hugely positive results.
Recipient information such as first name, city, or state personalization is one of the most common ways to effectively grab a consumers’ attention. Although statistics prove using first name is a quick and easy way to boost engagement, many readers have caught on to this strategy and efficacy may drop with continuous use.
Personalizing a mailer by featuring the city or community where the recipient resides is another great (yet subtle) way to foster connection and stick out in your audience’s mind. For example, running a summer sale campaign that offers 20% off to the incredible citizens of “Brooklyn” or “Chicago,” adds an extra level of connectivity that always stands out on the receiving end.
A recipient’s state can similarly be used to add a targeted personal touch. One example of this would be referring your audience to a designated sales rep by state, to demonstrate focused and specialized customer service.
Location personalization doesn’t just stop at city and state. Location-based text can also be attached to specific locations or addresses saved in your Poplar account. This is very handy in cases where you want to target a certain mile radius around a brick & mortar location or any other area of interest.
While pulling from standard mailing and address info is a great jumping off point, especially if you don’t have a depth of audience data to leverage - the real fun and creative flexibility comes with custom merge tags.
Custom merge tags allow you to tailor products, services, and advertising to audience members by combining behavioral data pulled from your CRM/ESP or marketing platform to create an extremely customized marketing strategy.
