Can a campaign be too targeted?

Hmmm.. interesting thought!

We all know that a successful campaign needs the following ingredients: relevency, timeliness and permission.

In order to achieve the first item 2 ingredients in our recipe for a successful campaign,  as marketers we use segmentation combined with data which we know about the recipient in order to provide a targeted and relevent campaign.

All good so far. There are numerous industry reports and whitepapers which can be used to support these practices, in fact they are promoted as being Best Practice. However, at one of the presentations at the EEC conference, it was suggested that if a campaign is too targeted, you can actually scare a customer away.

How can that happen? Well, say for example someone subscribed to your newsletter, giving you only their name and email address, and then over a period of time, by being a good email marketer, you have collected significant data on them by tracking their movements, slowly introducing more and more targeted campaigns until one day they realise that you know a bit too much about them! This can then scare them away.

I guess, as with anything we need to use wisdom and commonsense when implementing campaigns. As the old saying goes 'All things in moderation'...