Posts tagged Variable Data Printing
Putting 1:1 Targeted Mailings into Action
Feb 24th
When it comes to 1:1 printing, there is more to success than design. There is also more to success than the amount of data you use. Well-executed 1:1 printing often falls under the umbrella of “relationship marketing,” an approach that focuses on fostering long-term relationships with customers rather than focusing exclusively on the short-term sale.
What might this look like in real life?
Say you are an entrepreneur with a small retail shop selling organic dog treats. Normally, customers walk in and place an order. You smile and greet them, hoping that friendly service, great products and reasonable prices will keep them coming back. You might have special discounts or promotions on a placard or written up on a blackboard behind the counter.
But what might this look like if you decide to implement a proactive relationship marketing program using 1:1 printing?
In this scenario, when customers walk in, you smile and greet them, but you also ask whether they would like to be on your mailing list for your newsletter, “Pet Pampering.” If they say yes, you collect their name, address, e-mail address and critical information for personalizing the content and message, such as their pet’s name, birthday and favorite treats.
Once a month, you send out personalized versions of “Pet Pampering,” addressing the pet owner and pet by name. You provide pet care tips, pet recipes and make relevant offers based on past purchases. If a pet’s birthday is coming up, you might offer a bulk discount. Around the holidays, you might suggest cross-sells to unusual pet gifts. When sales are slow, you might boost end-of-month revenues by offering a free sample of your latest creation if the pet owner brings in a coupon.
Because relationship marketing is about relationships, you might want to create excuses to open dialogs with your customers. This might include an occasional customer survey, feedback form or customer contest, such as for the best new dog treat flavor idea or the best picture of a pet eating your treats. This creates an interaction between you and your customers that makes each person feel valued and gives them a stake in their relationship with you. At the same time, it gives you more information to further personalize future mailings!
That’s relationship marketing—and it’s one of the factors that makes 1:1 printing great.
So, which is the “best” press to use for VDP?
Feb 7th
What Are You Printing On?
When considering 1:1 print personalization, one of the questions that marketers often ask is, “What
type of digital press should I be printing on?” It’s a natural question. In the world of traditional print,
marketers are used to scrutinizing the output quality of their printers’ offset presses. Thus, it’s natural
to want to apply the same standards to the world of digital and VDP print.
There is a wide range of output technology that can be used for VDP. At minimum, the press must
be fully digital. This means that it uses an electrostatic, inkjet or other digital process to apply toner
to the paper. This toner can be in liquid form (a limited number of models) or dry toner form (the bulk of
press offerings). These presses can also be cut sheet models for ultra short to standard length runs or
continuous stream models for high-volume commercial and transactional work.
These presses come in a wide variety of sizes, at a wide variety of speeds, at a wide variety of
price points. The result is that, whether you need 250 pieces or 2.5 million, there will be a
combination of VDP program and press output to fit your budget.
Can You Tell the Difference?
You don’t have to sacrifice quality, even on ultra short runs. Resolution on these boxes can range from
300 dpi to 2400 dpi, and with the ability to coat and laminate digital output, the results are so close to
offset that even many veteran marketers — let alone their customers — would be hard pressed to tell the
difference.The number of colors can range widely, as well. In the early days, the most toner-based presses
could output was four colors. Today, many digital presses can print five colors, six colors or in rare cases,
even more. Even for presses that do not have the ability to print special colors (which is
still the majority), the ability to accurately simulate special colors from fourcolor
process has dramatically improved, as has the ability to simulate metallics. Some
presses are able to use hi-fi color systems,
such as Hexachrome.
So, which is the “best” press to use for VDP?
In most cases, it doesn’t matter. Are you thinking, “Did I read that right?” Yes, you did.
Unless you have unique needs, such as extremely high- or lowvolume 1:1 printing or unique color requirements that demand a five-color or more press, the output technology is relevant, but not critical. There are highly successful VDP specialists producing these jobs on big, robust production presses and there are highly successful VDP specialists producing these jobs on smallfootprint digital printers.Unless you have special run-length or color requirements,choosing your VDP production partner should not be done on the basis of equipment. It should be done on the basis of the working relationship.
The component that has the most impact on the success of your VDP campaign is your database — its accuracy, completeness, and how that data is used, as well as the planning and strategy that goes into the campaign. These are the factors that will make or break your VDP project and are independent of output technology.
Cost Per Lead vs. Cost Per Piece
Jan 28th
One of the best practices for 1:1 printing is to evaluate the cost of campaigns differently from traditional campaigns. Instead of looking at the costs of a print campaign in terms of cost per-piece, evaluate it in terms of cost per lead. With traditional print marketing, the cost per piece might be $.10
each ($.36 with postage). But if a 10,000-piece campaign generates a 1% response, rate, the cost per lead is $36. If a marketer spends 10 times more on the print portion of a 1:1 campaign ($1.36 with postage) but generates a 12% response rate, the cost per piece triples, but the cost per lead drops to $11. When it comes to 1:1 printing, the method of measurement matters.
Boost Responses the Easy Way! ~ Prefilling Return Forms
Jan 21st
Make responding to your marketing easier for your customers.
Try Pre Filling Response Cards For Your Customers
Now, your marketing budget can go further than you ever thought possible.
Do you include tear-off response cards or other forms in your direct marketing pieces? If so, do you send them blank, or do you pre-fill them with information from your database?
If you are sending forms blank, you are leaving money on the table. Why? Because the more steps recipients must take to respond to your offer, the less likely they are to do it. Conversely, the easier you make it for them to drop the card in the mail, the more likely they are to respond.
Pre-filling your response cards is really a “no brainer” because it’s likely that you have all of the information in your database already. After all, you used it to mail the piece. So pre-fill your response cards with as much data as you have—the recipient’s name, address, company and other information they might need to register for an event, request information or whatever else you are asking them to do. By doing so, you remove one of the barriers and your response rate goes up.
One marketer had been promoting its customer education seminars with a self-mailer that included the dates and details of upcoming workshops. The mailers included a detachable reply card for registration. After more than two years, however, the marketer was frustrated that most of its registrations were still coming through its web site or sales reps, not the direct mailers it was paying for.
To generate more responses, the company decided to switch gears. It freshened up the design and moved to a heavier coated stock. It also ditched its static response forms and began pre-filling them so all that recipients had to do was add the stamp and drop the forms into the mail. It received such a bump in its responses that it had to add an extra seminar session!
The sky is the limit!
Would you like to get a quick and easy boost to your response rates? If so, and you are sending out any kind of form or response card, it might be as easy as doubling up on the data you’re already using.
*Please visit our friends at Great Reach Inc or follow them on Twitter @greatreach*
Getting More Out of Your Database; How Much Data Is Enough?
Dec 1st
How sophisticated does your database need to be in order to be successful with VDP?
A lot less than many people realize.
When many marketers think of Variable Data Printing and 1:1 personalization, they think of a relatively new marketing technology. In reality, the marketing and commercial printing worlds have been using this approach for more than a decade. One of the surprises has been that, it’s not how much data you have, but how you use it. Even marketers with relatively simple databases can create highly effective campaigns with great ROI if they know how to use them.
It’s all about relevance. For example, when one marketer wanted to increase traffic to its retail store, he was concerned about having only names and addresses from a purchased mailing list. The challenge was how to create relevance without recipient demographics, such as likes or dislikes, ages or income levels. How do you create true relevance out of “Dear Bob?”
Get Creative!
Use the recipients’ addresses to create maps to the store, along with distances from the recipients’ homes to the retail location. Other marketers using this approach have added estimated driving times. You might not get the same punch as if you had more detailed demographic data, but the impact will be significantly greater than if you’d sent a generic mailer.
VDP marketers consistently find that respondents to VDP campaigns spend more, on average, than respondents to generic campaigns. Thus, the “punch” is not just in the response rate, but in the
quality of the responder. Even if you get only a 5% response rate to your “basic” VDP mailing, if your respondents spend 25% more than respondents to generic campaigns, your ROI just shot up exponentially.
Another way to create relevance from a basic list is to do prospecting before sending out the actual promotion. Say you are a pet food manufacturer, but all you have is a list of 100,000 pet owners. Instead of sending out static mailers to all 100,000 names, send out a pre-mailer asking recipients to provide you with more information about themselves in exchange for the chance to win a high-value prize. Respondents provide their names and addresses — whether by mail, email or
Web site — along with the type of pet(s) they have and their pets’ ages, genders and names.
Now, instead of an undifferentiated list of 100,000 names, you have a pre-qualified list of pet owners interested in and willing to communicate with your company. Instead of sending out 100,000 mailers, half of which may be irrelevant to some recipients, puppy owners can be sent promotions on puppy food appropriate to the stage of growth of their pooch, and cat owners with felines in their later years can receive promotions on food for boosting energy in older pets. Plus, the front of the food bowl can be personalized with the pet’s name. “Hey, Trixie! It’s your owner’s lucky day!” This, along with the mailing label, might be the only personalized elements visible in the piece, but the content is tailored to the pet owner’s situation.
In the early days of VDP, it was thought, the more data the better. The more you can show the recipient that you know about them, the more successful the piece will be. That has not born out to be true. In fact, barring special situations, such as communications between financial companies and their customers, showing just how much you know about recipients can backfire.
Instead, it’s all about relevance. The extent recipients feel that the piece is relevant to their lives is what stimulates response, not the number of variable elements. And the great news for marketers is that you can create relevance even when the information in the initial database is limited.
