One-to-one marketing (sometimes expressed as 1:1 marketing) is a customer relationship management and marketing (CRM) strategy emphasizing personalized interactions with customers. The personalization of interactions is thought to foster greater customer loyalty and better return on marketing investment. The concept of one-to-one marketing as a CRM approach was advanced by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in their 1994 book, The One to One Future.

Only the term is new; the approach is almost as old as commerce itself. In the past, for example, proprietors of a general store would naturally take a one-to-one approach, remembering details about each customer's preferences and characteristics and using that knowledge to provide
better service. One-to-one marketing seeks to reinvest marketing with the personal touch absent from many modern business interactions.

How many different names can one type of printing have? Here's a sampling: variable information printing, personalized printing, personalized publishing, variable data printing, customized printing, database publishing, on-demand printing, 1:1 publishing, and many more. It's a lot like mail merge (yes, like with your word processing software) but on a larger scale.

The idea of personalized printing is amazing for commercial printers, may they be small or large businesses, that 1:1 personalized marketing is constantly a topic of conversation in the printing industry. And thanks to digital equipment manufacturers, software developers, database visionaries, etc. etc., 1:1 personalized marketing is finding some significant success. Many companies are now adopting strategies to help 1:1 personalized marketing become more popular even with the smaller industries. They are developing significant dents in technology and infrastructure to support 1:1 personalized marketing and provide software to make it work as easily as most of the other desktop applications.

Where are 1:1 personalized marketing solutions being applied successfully today? The flexibility and scalability of 1:1 personalized marketing yields a broad set of applications, from basic data merge for business correspondence to highly complex customized promotional pieces - with recipients ranging from one to one million.

• Custom publications
  Custom publications are business applications that allow a customer to drive specific content into an existing template for immediate publishing or for inclusion in a newsletter or periodical.
• Business correspondence
  Business correspondence incorporates name, address, and simple product information to produce a unique piece for each recipient.
• Simple one-to-one marketing
  Simple one-to-one incorporates some graphical elements and variable text that are included based on a simple set of rules to produce a unique composition that is customized to each recipient.
• Multi-channel marketing campaigns
  Multi-channel campaigns incorporate completely unique text, images, and graphics for each recipient based on rules that make decisions on the demographics, purchasing history, or other predictive methods to enhance the relevance to the recipient and publishes it through a combination of print, Web, and e-mail.