Increasingly, marketers are gathering more data. But do they know what to do with it once they have it?

According to a research study by the Aberdeen Group last year (and now being offered a free download by Adobe), best in class marketing organizations are gathering loads of data through techniques like website visitor tracking; tracking, measurement, and reporting on all marketing campaign results; and testing effectiveness of campaign content; but too few are taking the critical, additional steps to understand exactly what these data mean or how to use them.

For example, do CMOs know what these data tell them about the identity, behavior, and potential spend of their prospects and customers? Are they using this data to build unique customer profiles and personas to match specific campaign goals? Do they know who is spending the most money, when, and why?

Not enough of them.

Likewise, too few have campaign dashboards that allow them to coordinate what they know and what they are learning on the ground across their various channels. As the report notes:

As the volume of customer-related data (transactional, behavioral, and unstructured) continues to grow, marketing organizations are in danger of becoming increasingly data-rich but insight-poor.

In other words, it’s great to have data, but if you’re not using it properly, it’s like having a full toolkit but only taking the hammer out of the box.

As service providers, this leads to an interesting question. Are you focused on encouraging customers to gather data? Or are you encouraging them to dig deep to figure out how to use that data once they have it? Finally, are you prepared — really prepared — to help them do that?

This research includes profiles of best-in-class strategies for managing data (including process, technology, knowledge management, organization, and benchmarking performance), along with illustrative case studies. Best of all, it’s free. Check it out.

“Personalization” continues to be a prominent topic in a number of different circles: marketing, publishing, eCommerce, social networking, and search. It’s no wonder why: personalization helps boost response rates and profitability in cross-media campaigns, helps marketers drive conversion on their Websites & landing pages, and much more.

Wikipedia provides a very broad definition of personalization, which I do like: “using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals.” Specific to the groups that I am referring to, I believe that personalization can be more precisely defined as leveraging data to deliver relevant content to specific individuals.

That’s still pretty broad; what kind of data? what kind of content? what channels are being used? With this many constituencies looking to use personalization in their own ways to meet specific goals, those answers can range extensively. Furthermore, when these groups end up talking to each other about personalization, it can cause confusion and miscommunication. To clear the air, so-to-speak, I wanted to shed some light on the different ways personalization is being employed by these different groups.

• Cross-media Direct Marketing: You’re likely familiar with the personalization model for cross-media campaigns: a digitally-printed direct mail piece (or e-mail) with variable text and graphic elements and a personalized URL, which links to a personalized microsite with variable text and graphic elements, often highlighting the recipient’s name in some way. Personal and demographic data is primarily used to drive the personalization in these applications. Depending on the client/campaign, additional data may be used for more granular, relevant content.
• Digital Marketing: Personalization is popular with digital marketers. E-mail is a popular spot for personalization: according to a 2011 study by marketing technology provider Alterian, 72% of marketing professionals surveyed reported using personalization for their e-mail campaigns. E-mail marketing complexity ranges from mass blasts to segmentation to real-time individualization, typically using customer data and purchase history data to make recommendations. Another prominent personalization tactic for marketers is retargeting, which involves serving ads to a specific user after they have left a Website in efforts to raise brand awareness, recapture their attention, and drive people back to their Website.
• eCommerce: Business-to-consumer eCommerce was and still is a center of innovation in Web personalization, driven by Amazon.com and other eTailers looking to provide a custom-tailored experience for each individual user in hopes of getting them to buy more. For these sites, personalization often comes in the form of a recommendation engine, which tracks your browsing habits, shopping cart, wish list, reviews, purchase history, and other facets to deliver personalized recommendations on what the system thinks you would like. It should be noted that digital marketing goes hand-in-hand with eCommerce; real-time individualized e-mail marketing is common for eCommerce companies, and retargeting helps bring back shoppers that left the conversion funnel.
• Publishing: For print publishing, personalization often means mass customization, specifically in the print-on-demand model for books, where eCommerce orders trigger specific books to be printed, often in one-off fashion. Services like MagCloud and Time Inc’s Mine Magazine endeavor represent personalization efforts for magazines. On the Web and in digital media, personalization is geared more toward delivering relevant content based on an individual’s specific interests or preferences. Sometimes meeting this objective requires readers to input specific information about their tastes; other times, information like a Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader account may be analyzed to assess your interests and deliver content based on who you’re friends with, who you follow, or what news you already read. A great example of this method is exhibited through Zite, a “personalized digital magazine” mobile app.
• Social Networking: Social networks are rife with different types of individuals’ data, making them ideal for personalization. Social networks typically employ personalization to deliver relevant content feeds from a user’s friends or connections on a network, as well as to deliver highly-targeted display advertising. For content delivery, networks may use algorithms to interpret connections, interactions, and profile information among users and deliver content based on what it believes is most relevant to each user. For advertising, networks typically act a facilitator between advertisers and users, presenting key profile characteristics of users that advertisers can choose to target.  Facebook generated over $3.5 billion in revenue through this type of advertising.
• Search: Search engines have always utilized algorithms to determine the display results of a user’s query, but these algorithms have recently started to take user information, such as profile or location data, into consideration before displaying results. Just recently, Google stepped up its game in this area, launching “Search, plus Your World“, which integrates a user’s Google+ data into everyday search queries. Advertising is a critical component to search, and generated over $35 billion in revenue worldwide for Google in 2011. Up until now, most search ads have been delivered based on the content of users’ search queries, but location information and even personal information are starting to be used to deliver more targeted search ads to users.

At its core, all that is needed to enable personalization is data, content, and a mechanism to have one drive the other. As has been covered, applying personalization for different use cases has a substantial impact on the type of data being used, the content that is being tied to that data, and the types of delivery mechanisms that enable that personalization. Understanding these differences and requirements for each application can help different stakeholders communicate more effectively when pursuing personalization, as well as open the door to new opportunities

I received one of those refinancing letters in the mail today. It was perforated, tri-folded, and looked like some kind of official government document. The outside said, “Homeowner,” but inside, it addressed me by name, the refinance offer reflected my original mortgage, and the letter included a “pre-qualification offer.”

So the inside said, “Personal, relevant information for your home,” but the outside said, “We really wanted the cheap bulk postage rate.”

So which was it? A personalized offer or mass mail? In the end, of course, it was mass mail. We can do that in a data-driven way these days. But the interesting thing was that I looked up the company in a Google search and found lots of rip-off complaints. Not because the company was actually doing anything illegal, but because the perception was that recipients had been duped by personalized letters that weren’t really personal at all.

Basically, the data (from public information sources) was used only to get people to call the 800 number. From there, the information and qualification process began from zero.

For those of us in the printing industry encouraging clients to personalize their documents, this should serve as a warning bell. We can populate data fields in letters and documents using data, but it’s not really the same as personalization. Personalization has, at its core, the sense of relevance. In this case, the relevance was near zero. As a result, no matter how accurate the information, the perception was that it was a rip-off and a scam. The Internet is full of the outrage.

So the moral of the story is that data doesn’t make personalization. Relevance does.

The evolution of variable data publishing and the technology that enables it has been a bumpy journey. While that journey long predates my entry into the print industry, many of the issues that printers have had to deal with when trying to accomplish the creation and production of a variable data job have persisted: processing complex variability at rated device speeds, color management & transparency conflicts, and a mixed bag of “optimized” file formats have been thorns in the sides of printers and designers for probably the past decade. In the next five years, those problems are likely to go away.

Why? PDF/VT. PDF/VT is one of the newest ISO standards (ISO 16612-2 to be exact) under the overarching umbrella of PDF standards, with VT standing for “Variable” and “Transactional”. The intended goal of PDF/VT is to create an end-to-end, PDF-based imaging workflow for variable data jobs, making VDP jobs much more predictable, repeatable, and able to handle more complex imaging functions like transparency and blend modes. In addition, PDF/VT is intended to make variable data jobs more portable and more universally viewable. In other words, true PDF for variable data. (more…)

I was just reading an interview with Tony Cox, founder of the multichannel food consultancy 5th Food Group, in Multichannel Merchant. Halfway through, I stopped and said, “Huh? Did I really read that?”

Cox had been asked whether he recommended mailing catalogs anymore or whether catalogs are playing a new role for direct merchants in an online world. He said,

“It’s simple economics—as costs for paper and postage continue to rise, and response rates stay flat or fall, the costs of acquiring customers via list rental is becoming prohibitively expensive.

“Case in point, if the proposed postal rate increase goes through in January, it will be another nail in the coffin for both the Postal Service and for smaller catalog companies.”

Did you see it? The implication was it is becoming prohibitively expensive to acquire customers via list rental by sending them unsolicited catalogs as a prospecting tool. Therefore — and Mr. Cox didn’t say this, but in context — the reader was left to assume that the alternative in today’s postal climate was electronic media.

Mr. Cox did mention catalogs reducing page counts, but there wasn’t a single mention of personalization.

Instead of just writing off print for prospecting, as was implied, why not just switch your prospecting to postcards? Pitch the catalog, then let people choose the products on which they would like information. Send them to a personalized URL, where they can select their product categories, then get them excited about watching for their personalized catalogs in the mail.

If you want to boost response rates, over-size the cards and laminate them. Are they more expensive than traditional postcards? Of course! But they’ll be cheaper to send than catalogs! Then when you do send catalogs, they’ll be slimmer and more cost-effective.

With today’s personalization technologies, creating personalized catalogs is easier than ever. Software vendors like Gluon have created online-based solutions optimized for creating publications that are absolutely terrific. Even small companies can use them. Especially when customers self-select their own categories, there is no excuse for not personalizing these days.

The bottom line is that there is no need to abdicate print. Catalogers just need to do it smarter!

It’s too bad that message didn’t make it into the interview.

“In a difficult economy like this marketing budgets are tight. The only projects that get funded are the ones that can prove strong ROI. That’s why you need a way to prove to clients that your solutions will deliver.”

This quote came from a November 18 press release from Caslon & Company promoting a PODi Webinar, “Promoting the Value of Your Solution.” The seminar is designed to promote Caslon & Company’s Value Calculators, a tool for determining ROI projections from 1:1 printing jobs, which I think is a terrific idea.

But the thing that struck me in reading this was the spate of discussions I’ve had recently in which it’s become clear that proving value for a 1:1 printing campaign is the all-important first step, but it’s not enough by itself. Even the most successful 1:1 applications — in which the results are measured and recorded — are often not repeated. This is something that has proven to be extremely frustrating even for the most proactive 1:1 printing / marketing solutions providers.

Recently, I’ve been posting this question in various areas of LinkedIn. Here are some of the interesting and insightful reasons that have been shared with me.

• Clients do not follow up and verify results.

(Which leads to the question: Are printers following up to find out why clients may not be repeating? If it’s a matter of too much time and effort, are these printers letting their customers mistakenly think that repeat applications take the same time commitment as the initial deployment—and if so . . . why?

• Despite the results, the projects just take too long and are too time-consuming. Marketers like the results but just don’t want to put that much work in again.
• The sales cycle is so long that, once a project is completed, the original marketing team or individual at the company who spearheaded the project has moved on and the printer’s salesperson must start from scratch.

And thanks to Peter Wann, industry consultant, for bringing up this very overlooked but critical disconnect in the process:

• Clients may track response rates, but they don’t track conversion rates. If the client isn’t tracking the conversion rate, the results may not be tracking back to the original campaign.

This insight is particularly thought-provoking and may be one of the dark underbellies of the 1:1 (personalized) printing sales process. As with all challenges facing this marketplace, the solutions won’t be simple or easy, but they start with acknowledgement of the problem, followed by frank and open discussion.

Have your insights or experience to share? Comment on this post or log into my profile on LinkedIn and click on the Answers link and share them!