Garbage In, Garbage Out - Why personalisation is only as good as your data
Written by Kieran Cooper, Lyris UK
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
There’s been a very amusing spat on various email blogs this week which all started when commentator Ken Magill demonstrated just what happens when an email campaign doesn’t use double opt-in, and therefore allows anyone to sign up with any data. (Search for 'Stupid Poopyhead' if you’re interested!)
I won’t get into the argument about email confirmation here, but it did raise a key issue for me. However sophisticated your personalisation is - and by extension your dynamic content - your whole programme has the potential to be torpedoed if the underlying data isn’t good enough.
In my experience, there are a whole host of ways by which companies collect data about customers. It might be manually entered from handwritten cards collected in-store, or from business cards collected at trade shows, or telephone customer services staff might enter the data into the CRM system. Even if you’re actually getting the data directly from customers themselves, as was the case in Ken Magill’s example, you still run the risk of problems if there aren’t sufficient checks to verify the quality of the data being entered.
Personalisation is a very sharp double-edged sword. Get it right and it can work wonders by increasing the impact of your message. But get it wrong and your customer’s perception of you as a company can be seriously damaged - sometimes irreparably.
I remember once taking a telemarketing call from someone selling advertising, way back in the dark ages when people used to print these things called magazines using paper and ink. He’d obviously been on expensive sales training to learn that if you use the person’s first name as often as possible during the call, you’ll convince the person that you’re his/her friend and you’ll have no problem closing the deal. The trouble was that this bloke had decided my name was Kevin. No disrespect to all the Kevins out there, but Kevin is not Kieran - and it meant that his chances of making a sale were reduced significantly every time he called me by the wrong name.
So before you start addressing someone by their first name in an email - or using their gender to determine whether you’re going to sell them lingerie or power tools - make sure you do a thorough data audit to check that the information you’re using is going to be correct. And if there is any chance of it being wrong, my advice is that you’d be better off not personalising, rather than personalising incorrectly.
Otherwise when the next batch of customer complaints rolls in, "Stupid Poopyhead" could be what your boss decides to call you!
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About the Author
Kieran Cooper is the General Manager of Lyris UK. After a degree in music, Kieran began his career as a marketing manager for some of the most prestigious UK arts organisations including the Aldeburgh Festival and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra where he led the way in the use of CRM data for direct marketing, in the days before the Internet was invented. After a spell running his own management consultancy, he joined Lyris UK to work alongside Andrew Robinson acting as Lyris' UK presence. These days his job involves everything from sales and account management to implementation projects and support for the 250 Lyris customers in the UK and Europe.
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