:: 5 WAYS TO RE-VITALIZE YOUR RELEVANCE
The more relevant your marketing programs are, the more successful they’ll be – the evidence is undeniable. How do you get there? How do you take your customer communication from simple personalization and bump it up a few notches to include triggered and highly tailored communications based on specific customer behavior and patterns? Here are five ways to boost the relevancy of your campaigns:

:: Data Collection – do it: Start collecting data on your customers now. You’ll be unable to build on specific customer profiles without information about who your customers are. Create customer preference centers and start simple by capturing personal preferences and product interests. Conduct surveys periodically and in small amounts of questions. Rather than guessing or inferring what customers want, it’s fairly easy today to get customers to explicitly express their preferences.

:: Use it or Lose: Now that you have the information – use it. Instead of creating two or three versions of communications that address customers' general needs, get specific. By utilizing templates, new technology allows you to create hundreds of versions so you can reach out and develop individual relationships with each and every one of your customers. Versions include specific images, narrative, and offers targeted to the needs of a given individual.

:: Respect Customer choice of Channels: Relevancy is not only about the information contained in the communication, it’s about how the information gets delivered. Do your customers respond better to email or direct mail? Or is it a combination of both? Does direct mail drive them to your web site most effectively or will a link embedded in the email be more effective? Capture this information in your customer preference center – if your customers are telling you how they want the information, you’ve increased the likelihood that they’ll respond.

:: Triggers take it further: You know who your customers are and what they want – now reach them when they want the information. Use customer behaviors as a trigger for when a new communication should go out. Start simple by creating one or two triggered communications, evaluate the results and continue to modify. Triggered communications alone can improve results by several factors.

:: Accelerate your testing and learning: With all the variables of timing, offer dimensions, content, and customer information in play for every communication, traditional testing methods such as A/B splits will take an enormous amount of time to discover what works and what doesn’t. Use Multivariable Testing to test your programs on a continual basis. These methods allow you to simultaneously test multiple variables, giving you accelerated results and enabling you to implement your findings even quicker.

Relevancy in your marketing programs is key, but how far you take it can make all the difference in your results.

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