One-to-one marketing and its implications for copywriters

In recent weeks, I’ve discussed why you need to adjust your copywriting’s personality to appeal to different audiences. It just comes with the territory.

Well, the rise of one-to-one marketing means the ability to mould your language and style to match your target market could soon be in greater demand.

What is one-to-one marketing?

With marketing budgets being dragged towards the guillotine, marketers are scrambling to deliver campaigns that provide a better return on investment.

The cost of mass, untargeted campaigns is becoming harder to justify, and annoying prospects with irrelevant messages is to be avoided when customer retention is so high on the agenda.

In order to improve their relevancy and appeal, marketing campaigns need to be personalised to match the preferences of each prospect. This can be achieved by capturing data on customers (e.g. with personalised URLs) and then using it to customise future campaigns.

Subsequent email and direct mail messages can then be delivered that feature the products and services a target has shown an interest in. Better one-to-one targeting in this way means campaigns can be more relevant, generate more sales and stave off a marketing budget’s execution.

So what has this got to do with copywriters?

As far as I’m aware, currently the main elements personalised within one-to-one campaigns are the name, images and products offered. However, as more data is added to the pile then future campaigns can be more finely tuned and personalised to match the profile of each customer.

With the personality of copy so important to marketing’s effectiveness, it’s not a wild leap of faith to envision the language of campaign’s being customised to appeal to the personality type of each prospect.

Different personality types (B2B buyers, the technically minded, service orientated etc) respond to different emotional triggers. So it would make sense to be able to adjust the copywriting of one-to-one marketing campaigns to match each segment.

Speculation, but worth considering

If your product is targeted at a wide cross section then delivering one-to-one marketing with copywriting customised to appeal to a particular profile type could reap rich rewards.

Pure speculation at this stage, but something worth ‘added value’ copywriters being aware of because the effectiveness of one-to-one marketing means it’s a strategy that’s set to grow.

5 thoughts on “One-to-one marketing and its implications for copywriters

  1. Hey Matt,

    Essentially what you are talking about is Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. At its heart is the ability to mine a database and make connections that might not necessarily be readily visible without graphs, etc. The whole idea is, as you say, to find out what a customer has purchased before, decide based on that what they might like, and then give them an offer they can’t refuse.

    The comparison I’ve used before is a grocery store. Say for example you find that an abnormally high number of people buy a certain cracker with a certain cheese. Obviously these people know something that not everyone does.

    What you do then is give everyone who shops at your store who buys that certain cracker, but *not* that certain cheese, a special offer on the cheese. You talk about how well they go together, why not try it yourself, here’s a coupon, etc.

    Obviously, you do the same with all the people who buy just the cheese and not the cracker.

    The idea of course is that these people will try the combination, and based on your statistics from other customers’ buying habits, they will probably like it. Suddenly you are selling more of that cheese and more of those crackers. Best of all, they will remember subconsciously or otherwise that they learned about the combination at your store, and will likely out of habit go out of their way to buy that combination there. This of course helps increase customer loyalty.

    You touched on it here: it cost a lot less to retain a current customer than find a new one. CRM is one way that you can help increase loyalty and increase the average spending of your customers. This isn’t completely greed-driven — the customers win too because the store is introducing them to new and better products, combinations, services, etc. they might not have known about otherwise.

    Everybody wins!

    ~Graham

  2. Hi Graham,

    Thanks for taking the time to share your comment.

    Yes, I agree: using a database to drive CRM activity certainly seems to be the way forward. In fact, I’d say it should be top priority for improving the targeting of follow up marketing activity, particularly with the tracking now available.

    Lets just hope the value of well written words doesn’t get sidelined along the way.

    Matt.

  3. Pingback: ??????????????

Comments are closed.

Skip to content