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O P I N I O N
Personalize your marketing
J ust last week, I attended a one-day marketing event. The breakouts were wide ranging and motivating. Topics covered ways to write stronger copy, how and when to use open thinking versus closed thinking, techniques for getting and keeping attention – a feast for marketing professionals! In this digital era of PURLs, OKRs, and java scripts, a dimensional mailer and handwritten note are still the best way to grab attention.
Jane Lawler Smith
Another topic was marketing personalization. This session turned out to be high tech, discussing the nuts and bolts of a campaign that was personalized from end-to-end. The anachronisms and initialisms were flying. The overall concept – personalizing your marketing – took on increasingly strange form when talk of java scripts, PURLs, and OKRs/KPIs took center stage. However, when it got right down to it and the digital secrets were revealed, the core of the campaign – the attention grabber – was startlingly basic: A dimensional mailer and a handwritten note. Why? We walk around with handheld computers in our pockets or palms for almost all of our waking hours. Our keyboard skills are manic, whether we took a high school typing course or not. Many
of our daily activities involve interactions with screens. Not just work activities, but life activities as well. Yet, we are still human. Our reading comprehension is better if we are reading from paper, not a screen. If you want proof, ironically, you can Google it. Browse the plethora of articles. But if you want to really take in the content, print it out to read it. We humans take in more when we get the full experience, when we hold things in our hands, and turn the page – when we can read with more than our eyes. And we are curious. Dimensional mail with its odd size and shape
See JANE LAWLER SMITH, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER January 13, 2020, ISSUE 1327
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