The ability to separate your existing customers from your prospects is one of the things that make traditional database marketing very effective. After all, it's a lot easier to upsell or cross-sell an existing customer than it is to pluck an entirely new customer from the universe of folks who have never bought anything from your company.
There's no lack of opportunity to personalize messaging to brand loyalists, switchers and new prospects online. Behavioral targeting, remessaging, profile targeting and email personalization are all tactics we can use to segment and personalize.
Why, then, do I see a good number of campaigns that treat existing customers like they've never interacted with the advertiser before? In many cases, this can be downright insulting.
By way of example, a few weeks after making a big-ticket purchase with an online retailer, I received the same acquisition message in an email that any prospect might get. The email contained a pitch for one of the things I had just bought from the company.
The fact that this happens in a dynamic marketplace where personalization is easy says something to me. It says the retailer doesn't care enough about my business even to acknowledge that I've been a loyal customer.
How difficult would it have been for the retailer to look up my purchase history, insert a line in the email that says, "We appreciate your business," and recommend a product for me that wasn't the one I just purchased?
Not very difficult at all.
Fact is, CRM solutions make it easy for marketers to mirror online what they're doing in traditional database marketing. Ad servers can easily help to differentiate between folks you've already reached with your ad campaign and folks who are seeing your ads for the first time. They can differentiate between different types of customers, too. So why deliver the same ad you run to attract new customers to the folks who already buy from you?