online marketing is that the more personal you can make a pitch the better. Turns out the opposite may be true: A recently published study found that the more personalized a message, the less likely a recipient is to respond.
Researchers from the University of Illinois and Northern Illinois University studied the way people responded to emails from a fictional film-review Web site. The volunteers wrote a review for the site and filled out an online profile. Only people who gave the site permission to contact them with future promotions were included in the study.
The researchers found that while some degree of personalization, like addressing someone by name, made people more likely to respond to emails from the site, there’s a fine line between helpful and creepy. A message that addressed someone by name and said “as an action-movie fan, we thought you’d be interested in joining others in San Francisco” was the email equivalent of a pushy sales person, Debra Zahay, one of the study’s authors, tells the Business Technology Blog.
The study found that over time a business could start to personalize emails, but not until it had a longstanding relationship with a customer. Otherwise it’s like talking about marriage on the first date – while it shows you’re serious, it’s also a little freaky.
And that is really the bottom line, Tiffany Barnett White, another of the authors, tells the Business Technology Blog. “As academics we like to have really technical terms,” she says. “But really it’s just the creep-out factor.”
Tags: academics, action movie fan, blog, blogging, blogs, bottom line, business technology, creep, email, fictional film, first date, freaky, longstanding relationship, marketer, marketers, marketing, marriage, northern illinois university, personality, personalization, pitch, promotions, publishers, recipient, relationships, respondents, sales person, san francisco, tiffany barnett, universal, university of illinois, volunteers, web
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