The names have been changed to pretend this is personalised

In the course of a week I get a huge amount of email and direct mail both at home and at work, pretty much par for the course working in marketing.

The majority is pretty similar with a few exceptions that catch your eye.

Personalisation is becoming more and more popular, especially as more data is held on file about us then ever before.

This personalisation, adding your name, preferences etc is a popular and often effective touch to e/mail shots.

From this week 2 stood out due to their personalisation, but for the wrong reasons.

The first was a link exchange request for this site.

Now it might just be me thinking a little logic should go a long way, but if your reading this site and don’t know what my name is, I would suggest glasses.

So starting the letter with ‘Dear Sir’ is either stupid or just plain lazy.

For the sake of rewriting one word, it would give a much better first impression, as they say you only get one chance at a first impression.

The second piece was a direct mail from a fairly large online retailer addressed to a Mr I Can’t Be Bothered.

Now I admit that must of been the name I had entered when filling out some form or other.

However, for the size of this company, they really should of spent a little money having their data cleaned before sending it out.

If this has not been checked, then I dread to think what other names have been used and sent out to random address!

Personalisation in my humble opinion is a good marketing tool that usually gets better results, but make sure you spend a little time, and even money, doing it correctly.

Tags: direct mail, email, good marketing, Marketing, personalisation

Filed under: Marketing by Matt Dean