If you are looking to increase sales, write a friendly postcard to your customers. It’s not a new tactic, but one that with a few new twists has produced hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales for Coco, a high-end women’s clothing store in Nashville, Tennessee.

By leveraging her extensive customer purchase history to customize cards to each shopper’s preferences, Coco has taken the art of targeted or “one-to-one” marketing to a new level and doubled her annual revenue along the way.

“The idea that, as a small retailer, we can finally deliver a series of ads to different people, based on the preferences they have told us, has been one of my goals for more than 20 years,” says the CEO. David Cook, who founded Coco in 1977.

In fact, according to Peppers and Rogers Group, an independent one-to-one marketing and consulting firm in Stamford, Connecticut, Cook’s advertisements are one example of a growing trend among small and large businesses: personalized advertising for individual clients. The benefits can be reaped using many approaches: emails and printed materials, including brochures and magazines.

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From a 5,000-square-foot, two-level boutique in the heart of Nashville’s upscale Belle Meade area, Coco sells clothing from designers like Anne Klein, Dana Buchman, Tomatsu and DKNY, with prices and selection similar to Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman. Marcus. Cook spends at least a quarter of his time working with technology to compile sales data, handle billing, and design postcard campaigns.

“The crazy scientific part of my personality is an Oracle database programmer, so we tracked everything down,” says Cook, who was an early adopter of computers. He bought his first system in 1978 and taught himself how to program. In fact, since the early 1990s, Coco has kept every bit of marketing intelligence, including what each of her 25,000 customers bought, how much they spent, whether they paid full price, or only made it to sales, at the bottom. of data. Over time, Cook has determined that his top customers buy at full price (70-100 cents on the dollar), spending an average of $ 850 per purchase. Some customers shop at the sales, while others reserve purchases for important events.

In 1995, Coco began her personalized approach with a three-pronged plan. The key, Cook says, is having a wealth of customer purchase histories to build on, a visual branding strategy, and the ability to customize smaller mailing announcements around the house using desktop printers and preformed cardstock.

Cook says, “I can tell my database, ‘Give me a list of full-price buyers living within 50 miles, who like Tahari and Dana Buchman’s designs.’ Then I’ll email the customers who spend on those two brands. “Customers who tend to buy only on the sale get a different card as do full-price shoppers who tend to buy when new merchandise arrives.

Cook uses the mail-merge function of his word processor to combine shopper names with merchandise preferences from the database. Cards sent to high-end customers are printed in color. Black and white cards go to customers who spend less or shop at sale events.

When recipients open the mailbox, they instantly know that the card is from Coco. This is because all of Coco’s commercials sport a classy, ​​familiar style with high-end fashion photography. And, a personalized message on the back addresses your shopping habits. After being greeted by name, recipients are introduced to a handful of their favorite brands, based on past purchases. To top it off, each card is hand signed by the customer’s sales representative and stamped with regular postage, unlike the wholesale fee, for an even more personal touch.

Before Coco started sending personalized cards, its traditional postcard campaigns had a 2-5 percent response rate. Today, your personalized shipments typically drive 10 to 12 percent of recipients to shop at the company’s single store.

Coco’s advertisements typically target only a few thousand customers. Cook spends about $ 1,000 and a half days of his time to produce a mailing of 3,000 cards. The return on investment? “If I send the mail to my top, recent, full-price customers and track it in the database for about three months, I can get a return of several hundred thousand dollars.”

“It’s a fabulous return,” says Eileen Shulock, vice president of retail strategies for Knowledge Strategies, a marketing consulting firm in New York. “The technology to track what you are doing in your store is available now, and very smart retailers are looking to take advantage of that technology, be it on a small scale or drop shipping like (Coco) did or fully customized websites,” says Shulock. .

Printing companies can help

Although most of its mailers are generated in-house, Coco outsources its main sales mailers: Twice a year, 20,000 cards are sent. Image Builders, a Nashville printer who specializes in personalized publications, creates a “shell” card, which includes the graphic image, using traditional four-color printing. The printing company then personalizes those cards by running them through high-performance computer printers using Coco’s database. The cost is a few cents more per card than internal efforts, but the process improves quality.

Jason Altenburg, Image Builder vice president of sales, says the technology makes it easier for his customers to reach individual customers. But the key is to have a rich store of customer information to draw from. “Working with David was great because he had complete records of the last 250,000 transactions at his store,” he says. And that’s something every small business owner should think about, especially as database software becomes cheaper and easier to use.

Also, printing companies are beginning to see possibilities to help retailers personalize their reach. “We no longer see printing as a commodity, but as a service that allows us to actively engage with a company’s marketing department to obtain better results.”

Cook says attention to detail is the key to his marketing strategy. “It’s like a great symphony: all the pieces have to work well together,” he says. “The image has to be incredible, the right person has to sign the right postcard, with the right message for the right people.”