A colleague who does work for a nonprofit organization contacted me asking if I could do research on the success rate of personalized direct mail letters (Dear Joe) versus generically addressed letters (Dear Friend). Surprisingly, I didn’t find as many statistics as expected, but I found information stating that personalized letters outperform generic letters.
The Digital Printing Council conducted a survey and the results showed “tailored direct mail pieces increase response rates by more than 500 percent over a basic, non-personalized piece.”
Gotmarketing (pdf file) reports that “personalizing an email marketing campaign can improve response rates by
45 percent.” This one defines customized content and the customer’s purchase history as personalization.
ClickZ shares data from a study that “found personalization was the most important factor when contributors determine which charity or fundraising direct mail they open at 62 percent.” Second place? Timing at 59 percent.
It may cost more to personalize the campaign, but the response rate more than makes up the difference than taking the cheap, generic route. When I see mail addressed to “Resident,” I promptly throw it in the trash or recycling pile.
More resouces:
“Personalized donor letters always outperform generic ‘Dear Friend’ appeals. Donors deserve ‘special’ treatment and appeals should reinforce the positive relationship you’ve already established.” From FundClass.
Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc. learned “personal attention makes a big difference. The old cliche is true: people give money to people, not organizations. The more personal the contact, the more effective your fundraising will be.”
P.S. In honor of today’s date, I just have to write this. This post is dated 05/05/05 at 05:55. Also, Happy Cinco de Mayo.
Head Gnomie, Chris Pirillo, has been encouraging Lockergnome readers to drop the email newsletter and instead subscribe through RSS because many of the enewsetters were bouncing into the spam box or not even reaching subscribers because of the ISP preventing them from reaching their inboxes.
Steve Outing has written more on the topic in With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative as well as InternetNews.
I’ve been familiar with RSS ever since I played with Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand back in late 2001. Thanks to him, I learned about RSS and its power. I believe he started the news aggregator wave. I used Radio for about a year and liked its aggregator. The only reason I stopped using it is because I couldn’t use all of its powerful features and pay full price since I already established my blog with Movable Type and prefer it for blogging purposes.
Anyway, RSS is a great tool and it has a big and bright future ahead. But, does it replace eNewsletters? Not right now. Though, I’m using Feeddemon from the ever-talented Nick Bradbury and feeding it a ton of XML, RSS, and RDF links… I only check it a few times a week… and that’s only for a few resources out of the over hundreds in it. But, when I get a subscribed enewsletter in my emailbox, I read it every time. In other words, I can be as lazy as I wanna be and it’ll come to me. If I have to go to Feeddemon or another news reader, I might not ever see it because I am too busy and getting sidetracked by other things. Plus, there are so many news feeds, it is impossible to scan them all.
Putting on Freud cap, “And so what do you think?”
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