| One to one marketing
Marketeers see the most important development
in marketing strategy as being the increasing sophistication
of the one to one marketing approach made possible by developments
in digital technology.
We have been familiar for many years with versioning
on printed documents which have been used for billing customers
for services as well as providing some degree of personalisation
for marketing documents.
Computer processing power has increased dramatically
in recent years. It has been assessed that computer power and
capability quadruple every year as the cost of producing the
computer memory capacity halves each year. Associated with cost
effective and specifically developed software, this opens up
the opportunity to develop and design marketing documents which
include variable graphics as well as variable text which could
not have been feasibly undertaken a few years ago.
Everyone will be familiar with the success
attributed to the Tesco Clubcard and the associated one to one
marketing that the company undertakes in its mailing of full
graphic variable images to the customer base with information
drawn from the cardholder’s pattern of purchases. This
ensures that the offers that a particular customer receives
reflects exactly what that customer regularly buys so that the
incentive to retain loyalty to the brand is present rather than
a non-specific offer which may not be of interest. Tesco themselves
claim that this factor has been a significant contributor in
lifting the company to the number one position in the UK supermarket
league.
Tesco is a very large company using variable
data to good advantage. Behind their achievement with their
loyalty programme is a very big investment to serve a huge data
base of Clubcard holders. However, one to one initiatives of
this type are equally relevant to small companies and this offers
an area of opportunity to develop new revenue streams of business
for entrepreneurial printers and associated companies which
take away the dependency on just the print and fulfilment process
as being the revenue earning streams.
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