Our sales team has begun a weekly series of Best Practices discussions on various topics.  This week, we talked about the many studies pertaining to the ROI of Email Personalization.  I'm sure that I don't need to convince you of the tremendous value of lifecycle marketing, triggered messaging, behavior-driven segmentation or other applications of dynamic content.  There is a mountain of data to support the fact that these methods can exponentially increase your email marketing ROI. 

It is this knowledge that leads me to feel a bit hypocritical about the holiday cards that my fiancée and I sent out this year.  This was the first year that I opted to include a prototypical "annual update letter" rather than a personalized handwritten message in each card.  As a big fan of sincere personalized messages, I immediately regretted my decision.  However, it made me draw an analogy between holiday cards and loyalty marketing campaigns.  One mid-2005 study classified birthday-triggered messages as a "sophisticated form of targeting," while subject-line personalization (dynamically inserting the person's name, for example) was considered a lesser form of targeting.  What if this was a personal friendship that you were maintaining?  Remembering someone's name is probably the lowest possible form of friendship, but keeping track of his/her birthday is not much better.  If we use friendship as a loyalty marketing analogy, then almost everything we do to "personalize" our campaigns still looks a lot more like an annual update letter than a personalized handwritten card.

It seems like one-to-one marketing is not a question of technology.  The technology is out there...I can name myriad companies (including WhatCounts) that can bring true personalization to your marketing mix.  One-to-one marketing is more a question of resources and diligence.  In our personal relationships, we have the same limitations of resources (time) and diligence (care).  So, the real loyalty marketing question is:  How substantial are the relationships that we can create with our customers?

What if you only had one customer and you were responsible for his/her loyalty (in terms of RFM or any other measurement)?  How different would your messages be?  Would you remember every detail of his/her life like a longtime hairdresser or a good account manager might?  Would you be able to successfully monitor his/her preferences, manage his/her lifecycle and personalize each message?  Do you think he/she would look forward to your messages?  Do you think he/she would be more responsive?  Evidence shows that he/she would.

So, the challenge is to maintain the quality of your relationship and its related communication as your customer base grows.  Travel companies:  I live a few miles from the San Jose Airport...stop sending me deal alerts about bargain flights from Houston to Buenos Aires or Paris to Budapest.  Would you send that message to your friend in San Jose?  Apparel companies:  don't send me a back-to-school promotion when nobody in my family attends school.  Would you send that message to your friend?  Restaurants:  ask me when my birthday is and send me a message a couple of weeks beforehand.  Even a casual acquaintance would take someone out to lunch on his/her birthday.

Loyalty, like friendship, is something that blossoms over the years.  It takes a lot of time and care to foster both customer and personal relationships, but the return is always immeasurable compared to the investment.