One of the key influences behind the decreasing volumes in DM is a growing awareness that businesses need to be delivering timely and relevant marketing communications to consumers. Fail to do this, and they risk losing the impact of their message and ultimately, the customers themselves. The true shift for the industry will be in refining the method of targeting -- narrowing methods down further to get a much sharper level of relevance, ensuring clients will achieve higher response rates and a greater ROI. Our industry needs to recognise that the future of marketing will be focused ...

around triggered communications, based on intensive customer data analysis.

Not only this, but the pressure is on more than ever to convince clients that the wide-net approach needs to be rethought going forward. They also need to realise that more investment is needed in developing relevant and highly personalised campaigns for consumers.

In today's current economic and green-aware society, it's becoming no longer viable or responsible to blanket-mail consumers. It's now essential for marketers to go deeper and use specific, intelligent systems based on individual behavioural triggers to build their target groups.

This approach allows marketers to draw on the intelligence of the data held, along with the consumers' life stage, circumstances and recent activity to trigger relevant marketing communication.

The only way to achieve this level of accuracy and relevance is for the client to put real-time data intelligence at the heart of their marketing strategy. There is no value in developing a campaign and then adapting it to fit specific data requirements later on. We need to be clever with the data we use right from the early planning stages, building systems which predict when clients are about to lapse, leave, or indeed when they are ready to be up-sold to.

This approach does not necessarily mean a drop in the number of mailings and may actually provide an increase in volume in the longer outlook. However, it does mean a change in approach by marketers and their strategies going forward. Such practices will ensure that data intelligence is driving marketing practices rather than the other way round, which is exactly how the future of the industry should look

(Source: Media)