Marketing - personal and impersonal

At The Escape we are marketing like buggery at the moment. The core part of this marketing is building a database with a view to a more personalised experience for customers and prospects. This is harder than it sounds though and we are currently going through initial stage teething problems, which I positively call ‘feedback’. In fact, it is feedback - no doubt about it - because we have acted on it.

We recently ran our first two campaigns from the database. The first was to prospects and a select number of clients. It went down well and we got three new business meetings and positive feedback all round.

Then last week, we ran a much more generic direct mail campaign. A series of five ’summer’ postcards that landed one day after the next. In hindsight, this could be seen as overkill, but it was a bit of fun (we knew most of them would end up in the bin), and just a reminder that we existed.

Despite being personalised, the campaign was too generic. We had a couple of [justified] complaints from existing clients to suggest that it was over zealous and totally unnecessary. Although this equates to just less than a half a percent of recipients, it re-enforces to me that generic doesn’t work as well as highly targeted direct mail campaigns. That said, sometimes you have to be generic before you can start to break things down.

Managing an effective marketing database is one of the biggest challenges facing marketers; especially if you do not have the resources to fund and/or maintain it; but, the payoff, is oh so much greater.

And so, our challenge begins to develop more targeted campaigns to a much more refined database. Think Tesco Clubcard. This does mean investment but in a time when every other story is about the ‘credit crunch’, there has never been a greater need to be engaging with people.

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