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Does your CRM help you deliver personalized communications?

Posted by Jason Pinto on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 11:19 AM in Marketing

“Dear [ContactFName],”

If I led every blog post with a personalized greeting, do you think you would read them more frequently? Most likely the answer is no. We may appreciate the “touch”, but the simple personalization of displaying a person’s First Name may not necessarily be enough to convince them to read the rest of the content.

WhatTheyThink published an article recently on “Having the Capability to Personalize Communications is Not Enough Today“.

It is a good read. You may need to register to read the article; but if you are involved with print or other forms of marketing, the subscription fee is well worth it.

If it’s not enough to simply have the capability to personalize communications, what do you need?

Well — let’s talk about one absolute: You need data!

You need to try to learn more than a person’s name, or which company they currently work for. In order to deliver content that is truly relevant to them, you need to find out what they are interested in when it comes to their career. It may be important to know some items from the past (where did they used to work?). It’s important to know where they want to take their business in the next 6 months, 12 months, and beyond. It also can help to know what they care about outside of their job. If you can determine that something such as music, sports, books, family, friends, or something else excites their passions, you can put that data to use to appeal to them.

Of course, while you may agree that those are important data points to fill, the question is – how do you get them?

Think about this for a second… When you are on the phone (not a conference call) with a prospect or customer for more than 5 minutes, I guarantee that you talk about something other than the task at hand. Even if you only “shoot the breeze” during the call for 30 seconds out of the 5 minutes, you usually can pick up some important detail that helps to provide relevant background information about that person.

Well, what do you with that info? Perhaps you feel pretty strongly about the capability of your memory. Sure, maybe you will be able to draw upon one of those points the next time you see the person. However, does that really help your marketing team deliver personalized emails or mailers?

Here’s a different idea — when you are on the phone with them, open up your CRM application. Search for their contact record, and enter a new Note. Type in what you’ve learned. If you can’t do it at that exact moment, then find some way to enter the data shortly afterwards. Perhaps you can enter the data easily on your smartphone… or maybe you can ask an Admin at your office to handle the task for you.

The bottom line is this — if our marketing database is thin, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have access to more data than we’ve ever had before. We can learn things about people through social media channels. We learn things about them at conferences, conventions, and trade shows. We learn things about people from their friends and associates that we may have in common.

We have access to the information, and we must take steps to record it.

If we have the data, then we have taken one major step in the direction of truly delivering personalized communications.

Photo Credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DATA_CARTRIDGE.jpg

(1) Comment Tags communications, CRM, data, one-to-one, personalization