Building Subscriber Personas: Getting Relevant without Data Overload
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak and Matt Elliott, Director of Client Services for Listrak
August 27, 2009
Consumers are on information overload. It has been estimated that people are exposed to thousands of ads each day; and while most of these go unnoticed, it's easy to see how the numbers can quickly add up with all of the television and radio commercials, billboards, direct mail, print ads, emails, banner ads, telemarketing calls, SMS mobile text ads, etc., etc., that are constantly put in front of us.
How do you break through the noise to reach your target audience? How do you capture someone's attention when everyone is so used to ignoring marketing messages that it's getting harder and harder to influence their purchasing decisions?
To start, you stop talking at them and start listening to them. Stop interrupting them with messages they don't care about and start providing valuable information they want, need, and above all, requested. In short, you have to work smarter, not harder, to create effective marketing campaigns.
Email marketing has evolved from a simple tool that lets you blast out a generic message to a list of email addresses to a sophisticated engagement channel that lets you communicate with each member your audience on a personal level. This allows you to build loyalty and trust while getting to know your recipients as individuals. It takes target marketing to a whole new level and humanizes both your corporation and your subscribers.
Listrak, an innovator in the email marketing industry and the email service partner to companies like The Islands of the Bahamas, Hitachi, and Motorola, has published the following white paper outlining how you can communicate with your subscribers on a personalized level. We'll show you how you can build and use personas to increase the relevancy of your messages and engage your audience in a one-to-few scenario and how you can create variable email messages without spending hours mining your data.