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Don't miss out on big summer savings on catalogs, booklets, magazines and calendars. If you have any books you need to print this year, get your order in now to lock in this 15% discount!
We are all looking for ways to save money, but have you considered using a catalog to help your business make money. Product and service catalogs are a great way to increase traffic to your website and store. Call to have a rep help you get started or go online to place your order.
From all of us at Printing Center USA, we hope you have a great 4th of July and a fun summer!
Featured Case Study By PODI (The Digital Printing Initiative)
Anritsu Door Opener Campaign
Anritsu is a leader in electronic instruments used by the wireless industry. An extremely competitive environment made it difficult for Anritsu to penetrate four of the top cell phone companies. Anritsu needed a lead generation campaign that would help increase sales of their product. A direct marketing campaign incorporating dimensional mail, Personalized URLs, email and telemarketing. The campaign achieved a response rate of 7%.
Your Database Is No Laughing Matter
Funny but True! Could These Direct Mail Bloopers Happen to You?
W hen it comes to successful personalization, everything hinges on the database. You don’t need “deep” data to be successful, but your data does need to be clean and accurate. It also needs to be handled properly. In this article, we’ll take a lighthearted look at what happens when it is not.
We hope you get a few laughs out these stories, but in the end, the moral is a serious one. Data is serious business and needs to be given the attention it deserves.
Did This Really Happen?
The following tales are taken from the Direct Mail discussion group on the business social networking site LinkedIn.
The California Department of Health sent a direct mailing to 50,000 residents who receive adult day care. The addresses were right, but the state included a special gift to identity thieves. Recipients’ Social Security numbers were printed right on the envelope!
The U.S. Post Office decided to do a personalization campaign. Residents took an online survey, and based on their answers, the USPS sent them a personalized t-shirt. Unfortunately, the data was merged incorrectly, so the t-shirts were printed with the wrong information.
A direct mail house did not properly de-dupe its client’s mailing list. When the mailing went out, one hapless recipient ended up with several hundred pieces of identical mail!
At one women’s college, many alumni prefer to have their mailing names listed as “Mrs.,” such as “Mrs. John Smith.” During one campaign, however, the mail house dropped the titles in the NCOA process and ended up sending the reunion mailing to the alumni’s husbands instead.
When the U.K.’s national airline was creating its passenger database,
someone thought it would be funny to expand the passengers’ initials into military titles. So R. A. Smith became Rear Admiral Smith. The airline chairman received several letters from recipients requesting that they receive backdated pensions based on their elevated titles. It was funny until the data company had to hand search and correct every single title within 24 hours. All 50,000 of them.
During one holiday season, a purveyor of fine meats and other food specialty items dropped 20,000 catalogs with an 800 number to call for faster service. Unfortunately, the number was wrong. Recipients ended up calling a funeral home.
These stories may be funny, but data handling isn’t funny business. Talk to us before your next mailing to make sure your data is in the best shape it can be.
Copyright © GRC 2010
Why Personalize Print
Because tailor-made marketing messages are on the cutting edge!
More and more, we are hearing about 1:1 printing or “print personalization” (using printed pieces, often with four-color text and graphics, to talk directly to recipients based on name, gender, past purchase history or other information) to achieve higher response rates and better return on investment (ROI).
 What’s the real deal with these applications? Is this really a smart marketing approach? Or is it just a gimmick to get you to buy more print? Consider the way you are being marketed to. When you shop online, you are asked to register so that the site can greet you by name. Cookies follow your every move so that when you return the page views are customized to your purchase or viewing patterns. At the grocery store, your receipt is printed with coupons based on the items you just purchased. When you receive mail from your financial services provider, it contains information only on those funds in which you have invested or that the company is trying to sell you based on your past investment history.
We are used to being marketed to on a 1:1 basis, even if we don’t think about it this way. Personalization has become so ingrained in our experience that we barely realize it anymore. If you aren’t incorporating 1:1 print into your marketing, where appropriate, you are out of step with marketing’s cutting edge.
1:1 is not a high-cost luxury
Then there is the issue of cost. In today’s business world, every cost is increasingly scrutinized. Although marketers tend to think of 1:1 printing as a high-cost luxury, when handled properly, the opposite is true.
1:1 printing optimizes your marketing investment by not mailing irrelevant information to the wrong people. It makes every record count.
Properly tracked, 1:1 printing provides provable ROI, so you can compare its value against other marketing methods and justify your spending based on real numbers.
By focusing on your top-tier customers and generating higher response rates and per-order values from those customers, you can spend less on print and bring in more revenues.
More relevant communications (newsletters, bills and other correspondence) increase customer retention and provide a benefit difficult to quantify yet with real bottomline benefits.
From this perspective, 1:1 printing seems less like a luxury and more like a business necessity.
Copyright © GRC 2010
Interactivity Gets Results!
There is a reason pet stores put kittens and puppies into open cages in the center of the main aisle. People who reach out and play with them are far more likely to purchase them. The same concept also works in print.
 People who interact with a printed piece are more committed to responding to its message. It’s why “create your own brochures” are so effective. It’s not just because the resulting brochures are fully personalized to people’s needs, tastes, and wants. It’s because people create the brochures themselves and have a vested interest in them.
Consider the example of personalized college brochures. Colleges and universities send out mailers to high school seniors in the target demographic, inviting them to a personalized URL where they can get more information on the school. Students then select the course tracks, extra-curricular activities, and other information they are interested in. The school then prints and mails the brochures to the students, usually within the next 24 – 48 hours.
Not only are response rates to these campaigns higher than traditional campaigns, but the enrollment rates for the students who create these personalized brochures are consistently higher, too.
One marketer, Taser Corporation (of “zap the bad guys” fame), took this “create your own” concept to the hilt when it allowed police departments to log into a website where they could input specifics from their department and generate personalized quotes. The online ROI calculator estimated net costs saved, officer injuries avoided, and lives saved, among other estimates, all based on data input by the officer. The result was a tremendous investment in the process that yielded big returns.
Not every marketer has the budget for this, of course. Nor is such sophistication always necessary. There are lots of ways to get people to interact with print. Recipients can lift a flap. Press a button. Scan a QR code. Pull out a glued-on accordion-fold message panel.
The point is simply that once they interact with the printed piece (and there are lots of ways to do that), recipients are more likely to respond to the message because they have a vested interested in it. In essence, they “own” part of the message because they created it. That generates results.
Talk to us about how you can create a more interactive component in your next 1:1 print marketing piece!
Copyright © GRC 2010
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