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Staying Personal with Direct Marketing

By Adam Dewitz on May 4th, 2008

The 1to1 Media blog has a short case study on a unique direct marketing campaign from a small college in northeast Pennsylvania:

The small school in northeast Pennsylvania wanted to attract local incoming freshmen who typically had the credentials to attend college far away from home. Their marketing team decided to focus on a small number of students to personally bombard with advertising. Not brochures in the mail, calls to their house, or personal websites like a lot of colleges do; Wilkes bought billboard space, radio spots, and TV commercials to say things like “Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)”

The blog post notes that the college was able to convince a number of the targeted students to apply to Wilkes.

This is the first time I have heard of personalized billboards being employed in direct marketing campaigns except for scenes in the 2002 movie Minority Report.

What unique tactics have you used to break out of the generic “Dear Firstname Lastname” mold? What do you see as the hot new applications in personalized communications?

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  1. 4 Responses to “Staying Personal with Direct Marketing”

  2. By Suzanne on May 6, 2008 | Reply

    The hot new applications in personalized communications will be those that are truly personalized. They will be signed BY HAND and will go to individual customers from individual employees speaking for the company and taking “ownership” of that customer or potential customer. They will be produced one at a time. In other words, what is old will be new again, and there is NO WAY ON EARTH to fake “personalized” communications. Period and exclamation point! Even the older method of adding a personal note to a form letter is better than these newer methods that are so phony I throw them away as soon as I read the first “Dear Suzanne”.

  3. By Howard on May 8, 2008 | Reply

    Suzanne, what is your profession in the printing industry? I would like to hear more about your solution to increasing profits via direct marketing.

  4. By bill zervis on May 10, 2008 | Reply

    Suzanne, agree I think laser printing stinks compared to typed letters. Bill

  5. By Adam Dewitz on May 11, 2008 | Reply

    Eliot Harper dug up a little more on the billboard campaign over at VeeDeePee: http://www.veedeepee.com/2008/05/a_little_too_personal.html