Kelly Fiedler’s 12 Ways to Make Personalized Direct Mail Pay Off
Avoid “Ready…Shoot…Aim": Defining goals beforehand will let you quantify the value of personalization.
Build customer trust: Swap tangible benefits for customer information. Stress your privacy and opt-out policies.
Stay flexible: Minimize hard-coding of your personalization criteria.
Start small: Focus on a single personalization feature— cross-sales, for instance. Then build from there.
Respect customer preferences: If a customer opts out of personalized mail, obey.
Keep your database up to date: The state of the world changes continually. Your database should reflect it.
Analyze personalization value/costs
Test before rolling out: Never assume that personalization always pays for itself.
Boost your predictive ability: Constantly analyze cross-sales, customer value, attrition data and other factors.
Speed the process: Ask database vendors to keep you checked out on their systems to avoid bottlenecks.
Interact with customers fast: No customer owes you patience while your system fumbles with his order.
Observe trends: It’s the only way to know where your program is succeeding, or falling short.