• by Ross Fadner , July 2, 2004

One-to-one marketing, long considered the "holy grail" of advertising, remains a myth--but only because marketers have failed to implement the targeting strategies necessary to make it a reality, according to a recent Jupiter Research webinar.

The webinar, "Target Marketing: Using Dynamic Content to Improve Results," showcased a series of surveys that examined the marketing methods deployed by email marketers, as well as consumer attitudes toward their efforts. David Daniels, Jupiter Research's research director and webinar speaker, noted that "behavior is an untapped resource by most marketers today." He said that audience segmentation--which is made possible through surfing behavior, purchasing behavior, past email behavior, and psychographic information, as well as by demographic and geographic information--is largely underexploited by email marketers.

According to a Jupiter Executive survey, 76 percent of marketers personalize their marketing messages by five or fewer segments. Moreover, Daniels revealed that the survey shows how email marketers tend to segment by consumer attributes gleaned from traditional offline methods such as demographic and geographic information, ignoring valuable differentiation points such as open and click-through rates. In fact, less than half of those surveyed (45 percent) use open and click-through rates to segment their campaigns.

Daniels noted that retail, for which email marketing presents a valuable channel for direct sales, was surprisingly poor when it came to campaign personalization and audience segmentation. Only 16 percent of marketers targeted their campaigns by demographic/geographic data, and just 4 percent personalized messages--which included simply using the potential customer's name. Furthermore, just 6 percent of messages reviewed allowed consumers to proceed to checkout directly from the email; all others brought consumers to a landing page.

According to Daniels, marketers must develop a customer segmentation strategy in order to make dynamic content work for them. "We're all still largely product-focused," he said--"we're not really customer-focused yet." He added: "You should be trying to market product 'A' to customer 'B,'" noting that products need to be aligned to the appropriate customer. Other Jupiter research showed that advancing response rates through behavioral targeting can increase revenues by as much as 50 percent.

Daniels noted that improved segmentation may help alleviate the threat posed by spam. Increasingly, consumers perceive email marketing efforts as spam, even when they acknowledge that they opted into receiving messages in the first place.

According to a 2003 Jupiter/Ipsos-Insight Individual User survey, consumers said that 44 percent of the email they receive is spam, 31 percent comes from friends and family, and 16 percent are messages they opted into receiving. Thirteen percent of respondents said that they report email they no longer receive as spam.

Daniels opined that the clutter consumers receive after opting into and receiving email messages leads them to report it as spam. For example, when Jupiter researchers opted into receiving messages from 122 travel companies, they received more than 30 messages on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Daniels said that personalizing and segmenting email initiatives will help email marketers stand out from the clutter, and ultimately drive sales.