Companies
use email marking to retain high sales, but more recently, consumers are less
engaged with the emails sent to them by companies than ever before. An
exception to this trend is personalized emails, which often take around a half
hour each to personally create[1].
However, new technology created by a Californian start-up called Nova can
generate customized sales letters using online searches from thousands of data
sources in 1/60 of the time it requires to do it manually[2].
One major
advantage of the Nova search system is the reduced need for employees. With the
technology producing quality customized sales greetings in 1/60 of the time of
traditional sales people, companies will no longer need to hire crews of letter
writers. Instead, they can hire fewer employees to review letters if the
company feel the need to tweak the auto generated letters for whatever reason.
Thus, the system has the potential to reduce operating cost while increasing
sales potential.
A second
advantage of the system is that the program will be unbiased. A sales person
may, for what ever reason, not check certain popular websites when seeking out
information regarding a potential customer. For example, the sales person may
find Facebook too complicated to use and as a result fail to search for
prospects through the site. The Nova search system not only doesn’t discriminate
in where it conducts its searches, but it also searches through thousands of
data bases, a task which can burden manual sales people without some sort of similar
technology.
A third
advantage of this technology is that it doesn’t require specific training. For
forty dollars a month, “companies can get personalization generations for 200
messages per week” using a Gmail account[3]. This is
ideal for small businesses that don’t have a lot of funds available to be able
to better market their goods or services.
One thing overlooked in the article
is the potential customer response. Suppose a customer receives a personalized
letter from the company and calls the number at the bottom to speak with a
sales person. If the sales person isn’t completely familiar with the contents
of that auto generated letter, the client may be offended and turned off to a
potential deal. The article also fails to mention the limitations of this software.
How does the software determine what should and should not be included in a
customized sales letter? Will the software include information some may
consider to be too personal in their automatic letters? How does it stack up
against other customer search software, such as ONCONTACT
CRM 7[4]. Additionally, the software may be far less effective
when attempting to find customers who aren’t online often, such as senior
citizens.
I think one of the most important aspects overlooked is that sometimes people have emails that they never check. For example, I have about 4 emails. I have one school email, one email to use to sign up for social media with, one email for coupons/newsletters and stuff, and one final email for other stuff like financial information. The email I check the most often is my school email and my email for financial and other important information. So my question is: how will companies know if the email they are sending to is the account their customers actually use? If a company spent the time and money to send me a personalized email and the email ends up in the mailbox of one of the two emails I am signed up for, but do not really use, they have sort of wasted their times. Overall what I am trying to say is that this way of marketing is definitely risky. I think for the millennials email is dying out and we are an important market segment to target. I think that this marketing technique has a lot of flaws and think it should may be cut out all together.
ReplyDeleteBefore reading this article and your responses to it, I was not aware how much time was spent creating personalized emails. Following what Maggie stated about having four email addresses, I also have multiple addresses. However, I have it set up on my phone that I receive all messages sent to any of these addresses in one account. This allows me to have multiple accounts for specific purposes, but also check them daily. I believe that Nova's creation and use of this automatic message-creating information system will be very prosperous for the company. It will eliminate the need for extra workers and time can now be spent on more important processes. One of the only negative implications of this system that I can see happening is a malfunction within the system that sends the wrong addresses the wrong personalized information. However, if used correctly and without error, I believe it will have a major positive effect on marketing.
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