Here’s an interesting twist on internet marketing:

In a post at DirectMag.com, Ken Magill tells us the story of the direct mail marketer whose mailing campaign went bust because of the word “because”. The reason for the lack of success was due to the marketer’s level of familiarity portrayed in his or her letter.

Ken then directs our attention to a recent study from the University of Illinois on e-mail personalization and how expressing too much familiarity with your readers could actually be a bad thing.

Well, that must be making a number of marketers re-evaluate their strategy, don’t you think?

In fact, its become commonplace for direct mail campaigns to speak to the reader as if their our best friend. A quick look at my email and I see a lot of “we know you want to travel…”, “like you, I’m concerned about…” and of course the dreaded “because you want to improve…”

Which then raises the question: how much familiarity is too much?

According to the study, using the reader’s name is a good thing but pretending to be their best friend isn’t. Finally some statistics to support the need for responsible marketing.

So, here’s my question to you: if you are involved in direct mail campaigns, how much personalization do you use and how has it affected your success?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Everything Cyber, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.