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Last week, while at the Best of CAMA Awards, I had a chat with a colleague from an agency that uses our services from time to time. Over past year or so, we have been promoting the value of effective personalization in direct mail campaigns and I learned that one of their clients had embarked on such a program. As it turns out, their client has a long-standing relationship with another service provider, so we were not able to be of assistance on this one.

From what I learned during our brief conversation, there were some challenges and not all of the data substitutions were as clean as they should have been. We did not have time to chat at length, but I hope that these issues were resolved prior to the physical mailing of the pieces.

Regardless of the source of the data, it seems that there are always situations that you really have to watch for when using personalization. For each field that is to be substituted, you must consider all of the different options (or challenges) that you might encounter. You do not want to see greetings such as “Dear D.” or to see sentences like “We are looking forward to meeting with you and your colleagues from Suite 11”, resulting from inappropriate address data appearing in the Company Name field. There are many more situations similar to this that we see quite frequently and they can really damage the overall effect of well-intended programs.

Of course there are many solutions to this problem and perhaps the most obvious is to say that all data will be entered correctly at all times. This, however, is more of an ideal rarely happens in the real world. Also, it seems that for every rule that we set in place, new and unexpected exceptions continue to crop up.

The good news, though, is that a modest investment in data analysis can spot these types of problems very quickly. From there, it is a matter of deciding how you would like these situation handled and adjusting substitution fields accordingly. Again, in many cases, the adjustments can be made with standard program routines.

Quite coincidental with this chance meeting at the Best of CAMA awards, in late October, we decided to introduce a free data analysis and assessment program on sample data. With very strong technical abilities, we wanted an opportunity to showcase more of our services in this area. In addition to assessing data for campaigns featuring personalization, we are also looking at consistency of data (right data, right field), reasonableness of field lengths, conformity to Canada Post coding conventions and the physical appearance of the data. Additionally, we will be supplying a Statement of Address Accuracy, using Canada Post-certified software. You can get more information on this program by checking out our recent How Good Is Your Data? card. This is an excellent opportunity for a professional assessment of your data.

Whether you take advantage of our special offer or not (we hope that you do), there is always some analysis and decision-making when working with personalization. It is certainly a powerful tool, but it can backfire very quickly if caution is not exercised.