Opening your mailbox is a daily ritual. You check what’s inside, pull it out and start sorting through what to keep and what gets recycled. Getting past that first
hurdle is important (taking note of available real estate on the outer envelope that may catch your eye) and let’s assume that by keeping it, you are going to open it as well. What you see and read will ultimately play an important role in the following action you take.
When it comes to your annual campaign, you want your audience to open their letter and take action by making a charitable gift. Using static text across an entire campaign mailing may come across as something that’s cold and effortless.
Fortunately, digital print makes segmenting and personalization easier than ever. It’s not just for letters, either; postcards, self-mailers, and other formats can be completely personalized to the recipient.
Let’s discuss some best practices to segment and/or personalize your appeals.
Generating a List and Hierarchy
Personalizing your appeal starts with data. How you leverage it depends on a few key factors:
- The amount and type of data you gather and maintain
- Your confidence in the accuracy of the data you plan to use
- What you wish to accomplish
- Your ability to envision how to manipulate content
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself before pulling a mailing list:
- What specific data points are necessary to segment and/or personalize the way I want?
- Who’s included? Who’s excluded or suppressed? (e.g. Major donors? Non-donors? Current/recent donors? Certain demographics?)
Additionally, you may need to create a hierarchy to determine which variable field takes priority over others. This could include:
- Funds or specific programs
- Volunteers or leadership roles (National vs. regional vs. local)
- Donor types
- Recognition and giving levels or societies
For example, you may wish to target lapsed donors who are past scholarship recipients. How great would it be if you could list the scholarship(s) they received as a student? However, if you don’t have consistent data or have missing scholarship data for some alumni, creating a separate segment that incorporates specialized messaging for that group may be necessary.
If you aren’t confident in the accuracy of your records, prioritizing data cleanup is a crucial first step. You can always revisit your plans once they’re ready.
Prepping Your Letter and Mailing List
For a basic level of personalization, placing a name in the salutation or targeting frequent gift designations are essential variable fields to include. For those who are looking to take your personalization to the next level, you can consider adding variable elements directly to your layout, such as:
- Variable paragraphs
- Tailored sentences or phrases
- Specific pull quotes
- Targeted Imagery
- Personalized URLs (PURLs)
- Dynamic QR Codes
As you write your appeal letter, you will likely identify natural areas where variable fields should be placed. Using the data you have, you can sort columns to help group specific segments and add the personalized text you wish to use.
There are a number of ways to accomplish this task within your spreadsheet. I tend to give certain segments and columns a code or abbreviation so I can easily sort as needed if changes need to be made later. Once sorted, I can type my preferred text at the top of an empty column, highlight the rows assigned to the code and use Ctrl+D to automatically fill each row with that text.
Pro Tip: The Ctrl+D function is also a lifesaver when using the “CONCAT” or “CONCATENATE” commands in Excel to merge multiple columns into a single field (like combining a city, state, and zip code, or building a custom ask string). Just remember: your layout software only needs the final text, not the live formula. Simply copy the entire column and paste it into an empty column as “Values Only” to lock it in.
Test… Test… and Test Again
Once you have your variable fields incorporated into your document, testing is a crucial final step. The more personalized you get, the greater the chance for errors. Stepping too far past your comfort zone can slow your progress down to a crawl if your staff has to double-, triple-, or quadruple-check every single record.
The best thing you can do is analyze your current use of variable fields and consider one or two ways you could expand your personalization. Always start with broad, generalized opportunities before drilling down into more specific data points.
Pro Tip: Pay special attention to those fields that have varying punctuation at the end, or columns that alternate between empty and full fields. Microsoft Word doesn’t automatically adjust spacing for what is displayed in that variable field and can leave behind a double space—or no space at all.
These variances can be incredibly tedious to fix manually within the raw data. Instead, point out these specific fields to your direct mail vendor. Their data processing team can easily write rules to handle those spacing adjustments as they merge the data into the letter layout.
Why the Effort Pays Off
Putting in the extra time and effort to personalize your letter can be the definitive factor in whether it gets read or ignored. Consider these powerful direct mail benchmarks:
- 52% of consumers expect direct mail to be personalized.
- Personalizing direct mail with the recipient’s name can increase response rates by 135%.
- The average American receives 16.8 mail pieces per week, which carry an average lifespan of 17 days. In that same time span, we receive more than 600 emails with a lifespan of only 17 seconds.
- Direct mail yields an average response rate of 4.4%, compared to just 0.12% for email.
And if you think print is only for older audiences, think again. While the majority of charitable dollars currently come from Boomers and Gen X, the younger generations are highly receptive to the mailbox:
- 75% of Millennials say direct mail makes them feel special or valued.
- 72% of Gen Zers say they would be disappointed to no longer receive physical mail.
Ultimately, personalizing your annual campaign appeals creates a vastly stronger connection. It shows your donors that you care enough to acknowledge their specific affinities, history, and connection to your organization.
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If you would like more information or guidance on incorporating variable fields to better personalize your next annual campaign piece, we are happy to help. Contact us today to set up a virtual meeting to review your data and walk through the steps to make your next campaign a success.
Dan Krueger
7/1/2026