Printhink Blog

A recent brochure from the Printing Industries of America’s Digital Printing Council, “Print: The Multi-Medium,” touts the benefits of digital printing, including 1:1 personalized printing (also called variable data printing or VDP). In the brochure, the Digital Printing Council passes along the following claim:

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Did you know that you can increase the precision of your marketing efforts for free? 1:1 personalization is all about data, and the smarter you use your data, the more effective your campaigns will be. But if you are paying someone to append your database or do the data mining for you, you will pay for every little increase in knowledge. These efforts can be highly valuable, but if there are steps you can take on your own, at no charge, why not take advantage of them?

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If you are a marketer, you probably share a lot in common with a magician. Your budget is continually being squeezed. Yet, you are always being asked to do more with less. What are you supposed to do? Pull results out of your hat?

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In casual conversation, the word “profiling” often has a negative connotation, but in marketing, it is a driving force behind success. Building a customer profile helps you understand your customers’ attitudes, interests and preferences, and tailor your marketing to these and other factors relevant to their buying behavior.

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If you are doing any kind of geographic-based direct marketing, you may want to consider a new program from the United States Postal Service, or the current Unaddressed Admail Product from Canada Post. The new USPS program is called Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM). This program and the Canada Post UA program allow you to reach every customer in specific neighborhoods even without needing to have their names or addresses. Best of all, what’s the cost? As little as 14.2 cents per piece on postage in the US and 14.8 cents in Canada.

Sound too good to be true? There are a few requirements, but overall, this is a great deal.

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What are psychographics? Just as demographics describe what your customers look like (age, gender, ethnicity, income), psychographics describe how your customers think and behave. This gives you another way to segment or personalize your direct mail to make it more relevant.

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In order to produce a successful 1:1 printing campaign, all you have to have is a great database, right? Not quite. Producing a successful 1:1 print campaign starts with having a great database, but even once you have the data, you have to figure out what to do with it. Often, that means data mining.

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Smart Phones. Tablets. Laptops. Netbooks. PDAs. Personal computers. TiVo. Where, in the ever-expanding marketing mix, is there room for print? Is it even relevant today? In a recent study conducted by IBM, new forms of media will grow at a 23% compound annual rate over the next four years—nearly five times the rate of traditional media. Why should marketers include print in their next campaign?

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You are starting to see them everywhere.

They look like square jigsaw puzzles, sometimes in color but most often in black-and-white. They are in magazine advertisements, on billboards, on websites, and on business cards.

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Companies have been wooed to invest more dollars in electronic marketing by the promise of comparatively low-cost campaigns that can be tracked and measured easily, leading pundits to conclude that print is a dying element of the marketing mix. The truth is that print remains important. We print all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. It’s just that our relationship with print has changed. The marketer’s challenge is to find a way to leverage print to tap into a whole new world of opportunities.

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Think again! (Consumers love getting mail)

Think you’re being more effective by switching from traditional to digital media? Especially in the 18–34-yearold demographic? Think again! Two recent studies suggest that 1:1 printing may be far more effective, even among this coveted age group.

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The goal of direct mail is to attract attention. Colour printing, glossy finishes, personalisation - all are designed to help a printed piece stand out from the rest of the mail. Marketers and their designers have to continue innovating to get marketing messages noticed.

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One of the biggest misconceptions about 1:1 (personalized) printing is that marketers don’t have the data to drive it. This might be true in some cases, but it also can be moreperception than reality.

Often, marketers have more data than they realize. Maybe their data is not in great shape. Maybe they don’t know how to access it. Maybe the data preparation process seems too overwhelming. Whatever the reason, marketers can have trouble getting started.

The first step is understanding that finding, accessing and preparing your data are all worth the effort. In a What They Think Webinar, Barbara A. Pellow, group director for InfoTrends, observed:

The business market today is changing rapidly. Those who properly understand how, what and why customers make purchases, and those [marketers] who influence buying decisions with highly targeted marketing efforts, are those who will come out on top. . . The ultimate goal is to identify the best prospects and use strategic direct marketing campaigns to cross sell, upsell and resell.

Putting Data to Work
Pellow suggests three ways you can put your data to work right away:

• Resuscitate a dormant customer relationship. If a retail customer hasn’t ordered from you in a period of time, send him a personalized postcard with a coupon encouraging him to come back into the store.
• Proactively cross sell and upsell. If you are an auto dealer and know a customer’s lease is about to expire on a Toyota Corolla, send her a personalized brochure trying to upgrade her to a Toyota Camry.
• Create continuity of purchases through a loyalty program. If you are a local winery, before visitors leave following a facility tour, ask them to sign up for a wine club. Try to obtain birthdates and anniversaries of their family and friends so you can use the information to trigger personalized reminders for gifts for special occasions later.

Places Where Data Hides
Before you can leverage data, you have to find it. Where is your data hiding? In more places than you might think. Here are some places to start:

• Transactional data (both brick-andmortar and from the online store)
• Web contact forms
• Customer care (found in your CRM system)
• Business reply cards
• SMS/cell phone marketing contacts
• Responses to e-mail campaigns
• Trade shows/events (get those “card swipe” responses back into your system after post-show follow-up)
• Customer and prospect surveys

Any good database house can combine these elements into a comprehensive marketing tool. If you require additional data, you can append it with external sources, such as lists from Acxiom, Experian or InfoUSA to get a more holistic picture of your audience.

Need help with the process? Give us a call and ask!

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When we think about “marketing smarter,” we often think about spending more money. But what if you could market smarter and save money at the same time? Especially when it comes to direct mail, there are many cost-saving measures that can save you money and boost your results, too.

You may have heard that the mailing list is 40% of a campaign’s success. That’s the old adage, but it might actually be more. One creative director tells us the story of a client with more than one million inactive addresses in its customer list. The agency determined that only 30,000 of these addresses were worth mailing. The client mailed 300,000 instead. The results? The 30,000 returned a 1.5% response. The other 270,000 returned a .001% response.

What an incredible waste! Can you imagine printing 270,000 mailers destined straight for the garbage? Mailing more doesn’t necessarily return you better results!

This might sound like an outrageous tale, but it is more common than you might think.

Another marketer—a Fortune 100 company—was told that nearly 30% of its addresses would be undeliverable. Did the company immediately strip its mailing list of those useless addresses? Unbelievably, it did not! Even though it could have taken the simple step of running its list through the National Change of Address (NCOA) and Change of Address (CASS) verifications, it didn’t bother. It printed and mailed to everyone in its list. More than 35% bounced, resulting in over $3,000 worth of wasted postage.

The agency later found out that this was standard operating procedure for this company. Turns out, it hadn’t cleaned its mailing lists in five years.

On average, the United States Postal Service says that 30% of mailing addresses are out of date. NCOA and CASS systems are designed to help with that.

• CASS (Change of Address Support System) certification checks the addresses in your list to ensure that they are valid addresses in the USPS system.
• NCOA checks the addresses against a National Change of Address list to ensure that your targets are not living somewhere else, and if they are, the address is corrected automatically.

These are simple steps that are inexpensive and take relatively little extra time. Not only can they save you big money on print and postage, but they can return you better results because you start out with a current, viable mailing list. This is a small investment that can reap great returns!

When was the last time you cleaned up your mailing list?

Don't throw your money away. Mailing more doesn’t necessarily return you better results.

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When we think about success with 1:1 personalized print, we often think about data. How much data do we have? How clean is it? How is it used? Rarely do we ask one of the most important questions: how do we measure results?

 

If you don’t measure results, you don’t know to what extent those results are due to the campaign or to something else. You don’t know which elements of the campaign work and which don’t. If you don’t know what is most effective, you don’t know how to improve the campaign down the road. In other words, you could just be wasting your money.

This is the kind of critical intelligence that will help you refine your programs into maximum effectiveness.

 

What should you measure?

Start with your costs. This means campaign development, graphic design, list acquisition, data manipulation, production, mailing—measure it all. This is the only way to analyze your true ROI. Otherwise, you’re just guessing. On a 1,000-piece campaign selling high-end housewares, for example, you might get an 18% response rate and an average per-order sale of $125, but by the time you add in the costs to develop the program, build and clean up your list and print and mail, you might barely break even. On the other hand, if you are a Lexus dealer, perhaps all you need to do is sell one vehicle and you’ve knocked it out of the park.

Incentives. Not only is measurement necessary to gauge ROI, but it will also give you important intelligence about future campaigns. This intelligence will help you design programs and adjust incentives, not based on your gut feeling, but on real data.

Say you give respondents a chance to win a sweepstakes for $500 if they log into a Web site and fill out a survey. You know that this campaign generates a 5% response rate, with 28% of those responses converting to sales of $200 each. Now start asking questions. What happens if you increase the incentive to $2,500? Does the response rate go up? If so, does the dollar per sale increase, as well? Does it generate a 2:1 return? A 3:1 return? Or does it not affect the response rate or value per sale much at all? If you test and measure these things, you know how much an additional $2,000 investment is worth to you.

Audience. Don’t stop at one or even two tests. Continue to analyze over time. Break each campaign into multiple test groups, if necessary. For example, if you continue to increase the incentive, does the response rate continue to go up? Or does it flatten out? Does the effectiveness of the incentive change based on the audience you are targeting? Does a sweepstakes to win a free mountain bike motivate one audience, while a Nintendo Wii motivates another?

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Want to see the future of print? Take a look at Media magazine’s Creative Media Awards issue. If that doesn’t get your creative juices simmering, nothing will. Here are the “Top Three Lessons” we selected from the Creative Media Awards that you can use to punch up your next marketing campaign.

 

Marketing Lesson #1
Multiple touches boost intent to buy. With its Business on Main campaign, Sprint created a branded destination online where small business owners can network, get advice from business experts, and promote their companies—oh yes, and be exposed to Sprint’s marketing message too. In fact, Sprint found that if it could get people to come to the Business on Main site at least three times, visitors’ “intent to buy” a Sprint product rose 60%.

Marketing Lesson #2
Use deep content as a way to reach, educate, and hold customers. How many uses of baking soda can you think of? Arm & Hammer wants its customers to think of a million.

A&H joined Media’s Creative Media Award winners by doing something an increasing number of marketers are doing these days—using content as a branding tool. A&H placed vertical educational ads next to related editorial content. The copy was brief and offered little-known tricks like using a pinch of A&H to keep cupcakes from cracking. As a result, total pounds of A&H baking soda increased by 4.9% within a 52-week period. The campaign also boosted A&H’s share of the coveted 35–44-year-old demographic.

Huggies was another Creative Media Awards winner recognized for its use of content-driven branding. The marketer launched its own magazine, Countdown, to educate consumers on everything from pregnancy to labor pain and baby development while also gently promoting the Huggies brand. Media praised the marketer for creating content that is informative and practical rather than relentlessly pitchy.” The results? Eighty-three percent of the 1.5 million moms who received the magazine said they would “definitely or probably” purchase Huggies diapers.

Content-driven marketing and branding works.

Marketing Lesson #3
Tap customer frustration. We tend to think of targeting as being associated with short-run digital printing and 1:1 personalization, but you can target by selecting a specific demographic and marketing to the needs, frustrations, and perceptions of that demographic too.

This year, Starcom TD Canada won accolades for this approach in its Trust First Class Visa Infinite Card “Breaking Down the Barriers” campaign, which tapped into consumers’ frustration at not always being able to use their travel rewards. The campaign used a newspaper advertisement showing a man and a woman looking out at a beautiful landscape but seemingly separated from the scene by glass. They stood with their hands up as if pressing against the glass and longing to pass through.

The image was powerful. In the week following the campaign, sales spiked 29% and were 13% above targets. Overall, sales were 15% over the company’s objectives and beat the prior year’s numbers.

What should you take from this? Follow the lessons of these award-winning campaigns: Create solid content. Tap (and then provide solutions for) customer frustration. Touch your target audience multiple times with a well-crafted message. Then watch your marketing results soar!

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