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.

Technology has renewed the interest in the idea of 1:1 personalized marketing. Companies like Double Data are integrating direct mail with the Internet to establish Personalized URLs (PURLs) as custom landing pages for prospects. The technology provides a powerful data-driven direct mail solution with sophisticated cross-media tools to integrate marketing campaigns. The Internet can be used to create PURLs, microsites, surveys and “thank you” emails to deliver a complete marketing campaign with the tools to track the ROI.

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 integrated with the Internet - 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 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.