I had a friend in college named Michael Johnson Ridgeway III. Everyone called him “Trip” and he hated it. His mom always called him Michael and in high school, his friends called him “Mike” and he was alright with that. His sisters called him “Mikey” and he hated that almost as much as he hated “Trip” but his dad called him “Trip” and that was what stuck. I always called him “Mike” because he cringed every time anyone said the word “Trip” around him, even if it was to warn him about possible walking hazards like rakes or extension cords. “Don’t trip over that!” would cause a seizure. I ran into him a few years after graduation at a business convention and addressed him as “Mike” and everyone in his group started looking around to see if they had missed something. “Call me Jack,” my friend said, “everyone calls me Jack now.” (His great, great grandfather’s first name was Johnson and he went by the name “Jack”.)

Personalized marketing can be a tricky business. Contact information alone may not be enough to truly grab a prospect’s attention. Just because a person’s business card says “Michael Johnson Ridgeway III” doesn’t mean he goes by Michael, or Mike, or ever Mikey. If you want your prospect to believe that you actually know enough about him to recommend a course of action, it helps if you address him by the correct name.

In my last post, I suggested you start a top 100 list of your most important clients and prospects and make sure it is accurate. Before you start adding more prospects to that list, I suggest learning more about these contacts and using that information to market more effectively. My favorite piece of additional information is the “nickname” field. Adding that to your current data set is a good place to start.

The label “nickname” can be misleading. Most people that go by an abbreviated form of their full name like “Bev” for Beverly or “Bill” for William don’t consider these nicknames. While you will probably want to address a mail piece using their formal names, Beverly Jones or William Smith, in the body of the mail piece you may want to use the more informal address.

“Bill, we want to help you find the right car.” Or “Bev, we’re having a shoe sale for special customers Saturday only.”

This will give the impression you are actually speaking to them and not some name on a mail list. If a person goes by their formal name, go ahead and copy it into the “nickname” field so that it will populate the variable print piece correctly.

Depending on how you chose to market, other demographic attributes can help you customize your message to appeal to more specific groups within your prospect base. Marketing to women differently than you do to men will, in some cases increase your response rate so you may want to add a field for “sex” into your database. It is also common practice to market to different age groups with different messages. By adding a field for “Date of Birth” you can not only customize your message, you can send birthday greetings to your clients, letting them know that they are indeed important to your organization.

Over time, adding information to your data base like buying preferences or budget cycles can also help the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns but adding the three fields I suggested today, “nickname”, “sex”, and “Date of Birth” is a really good place to start getting more personal with your customers.