Communicating with thousands of premier customers worldwide is no small task, especially when communications span over a dozen languages on five continents. In 2001 I delivered a personalized email campaign solution that would “mail-merge” address each McAfee business-tier customer by name, in their native language (including multi-byte Chinese and Japanese), and with specific details about their account, such as their local account manager.
The system, co-designed with Specific Impulse CTO Dr. Chester Regen, featured complete mail-merge personalization, including language and country campaign variations, down to the gender differences in salutations.
Each email was individually monitored using a web beacon, so that McAfee could track the overall success of the campaign. Bouncebacks were automatically processed and delivered back to McAfee for database cleaning and updating. The system was well ahead of its time!
With this high degree of care and attention, McAfee customer care mailings received remarkably high response rates for several years, with “open rates” virtually unheard of in standard email campaigns.