Custom communication: Does it pay?
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James Morris-Lee is president of The Morris-Lee Group (Rosemont, New Jersey, USA), a marketing communications firm that provides strategic PR, advertising, website design and direct-response marketing services. A frequent writer on marketing technologies, his most recent book, ‘Real-time marketing: New rules for the new media’, was published in May, 2001 by The Digital Printing Council and GATFPress.
Abstract With the prolific use of personalisation in direct-response advertising — and now, fully customised text and graphics in both print and electronic communications using digital variable-data printing (VDP) — it would be thought that normative data on conversion rates attributable to its use would be widespread and readily available. In fact, there have been but a handful of studies of the relative economics of customised one-to-one marketing pieces as opposed to static communication (documents which do not change over their life cycles). All have been sponsored or reported by the printing industry. Despite the paucity of such primary research, however, the data from this handful of studies build a case for the value of VDP. It also helps shed some light on the dynamics of one-to-one communication, knowledge which can be helpful in designing pieces that help create more customers more profitably.
James Morris-Lee The Morris-Lee Group, Cane Farm, Building 11, PO Box 218, Rosemont, New Jersey, 08556, USA. Tel: ⫹1 609-397-1911; FAx: ⫹1 609-397-9275; e-mail: [email protected]
INTRODUCTION One of the overarching goals of database marketing — as with practically all response marketing these days — is to increase the level of customer intimacy, to get personal, to move the use of the pronoun from vous to tu (to borrow from the French) as quickly as possible. And, in the process, garner not only response, but sales — increasingly the true metric for performance in database marketing. The question is, does the use of a high degree of personalisation help support that goal? Put another way, is a highly personalised direct-mail campaign worth the significantly higher cost? And, equally importantly (at least for creative people), which types of personalisation and customisation yield the greatest impact on sales conversion?
䉷 Henry Stewart Publications 1479-182X (2002)
Vol. 10, 2, 133–138
Studies by the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 19991 and the Institute of Information Management (IIM) in Dortmund, Germany in 2001,2 along with a survey of customised brochure recipients conducted in 2001 by the Ford Motor Company and reported during 2002 in a white paper by the author,3 help provide answers to these important questions. THE RIT STUDY The first major study of response rates for digital variable-data printing (VDP) was conducted in 1999 by Professor Frank Romano and graduate student David Broudy at Rochester Institute of Technology, School of Printing. Romano and Broudy looked at the following factors:
Journal of Database Marketing
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Morris-Lee
— static versus personalised promotions: what
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