What's in a name? The power of personalisation in your marketing

Names have power. Making people feel like people can elevate a generic email or message and make it more likely they'll read or respond.

In How To Win Friends And Alienate People, Dale Carnegie says:

A person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language

It's a quote I use repeatedly when teaching customer relationship marketing.

The idea of customer relationship marketing is that we make our customers - or fans - feel like we really care about them. The secret is that you don't need to care about fans. It's easier and more effective if you do, but they just have to feel special or valued.

Personalisation is a really powerful way of doing this. And there's nothing more personal than a name.

The psychology of names

In 2012, Starbucks made a big change to how they were going to distribute orders. Rather than writing an order number on drinks, they were going to start writing - and calling out - the customer's first name.

It was out of a desire to increase the personal connection between staff and customers. This can get lost as a brand grows.

Earlier this year, the Journal of Retailing carried a study that showed that people are happier with their experience when their names are used, rather than numbers. And that it applies in-store and online. They've termed this "The Starbucks Effect". Science Says has also covered the study.

Numbers make us feel less human. If you've ever seen Les Miserables you'll be familiar with prisoner 24601 who reminds us whenever he's referred to by that number that "my name is Jean Valjean".

How to use names in your marketing

If you're collecting customer data, then you'll likely have peoples' first names. And that's all you need.

Email marketing

Email is the most obvious way of using your fans' names in marketing. Placeholders and mail merge mean you can switch out the content depending on who's receiving the message.

Here's a quick example from Charlton for their upcoming fixture against Wrexham.

This one puts my name in the subject line - "Scott, don't miss out" - as well as in the introduction. There are tons of examples of these. They're nice and simple, and add a little touch to help them stand out (the overwhelming majority of club mailing lists I'm signed up to never use my name).

Taking this one step further, Aston Villa used my name to welcome me when I joined their mailing list a few months back.

The subject line included #WelcomeGoodacre, which adds to the direction to make you feel like a new signing. I also like the use of "finalise your contract" to get me to confirm my address. There's no laws around double opt-in messaging having to be boring!

My favourite, however, is how Wolves did it.

My own shirt! I can see how it would look if I was part of the team, which is a nice feeling to get from a mailing list.

Of course, if you've got the data you could follow Southampton's Season In Numbers campaign and remind people about what they've seen over the past 12 months.

Social media

While social media doesn't operate the same way as email, there are still opportunities to include peoples' names in your content.

One way is in replies. When you're talking to fans, find an opportunity to naturally get their names into your responses.

There's also the opportunity to create custom wallpapers for some lucky followers. Bromley FC did this a few years back, spending time putting fans' names and numbers onto the back of their shirt as part of #WallpaperWednesday.

This is also a natural way of getting the sponsor into things too. I've always thought it would be a great idea as part of a kit launch - obviously limited to a certain number of requests and definitely not automated given the issues we've seen with these tools in the past.

While there's a resource issue in rolling something like this out regularly, as part of a new kit launch it could be a powerful tool to build connections with fans.

The State of Football Social Media

This year's State of Football Social Media is coming soon... with a bit of a twist this year. Subscribers will be the first to know when the survey is open, so watch this space.

You can take a look at last year's results below.