Best Practices in 1:1 Printing

 

If you want great marketing results, it’s important to personalize text, images, and other content based on what you know about the recipient. But just dropping in data-driven content doesn’t guarantee success. Sometimes other factors can dull your results. Maybe the offer is great, but the design is so uninteresting that nobody reads it. Or the headline is snappy and the design is great, but there is no incentive for people to respond.

Let’s look at three best practices that need to be the foundation of any 1:1 print marketing campaign.

 

   •    Traditional marketing rules apply. 1:1 might be personalized marketing, but traditional rules hold firm. Ultimately, all of the elements — creative, message (including personalization), offer, segmentation, call to action, and incentive —need to come together to determine success.

 

   •    Focus on relevance, not “personalization.” It doesn’t matter how “personalized” a document is. If it isn’t relevant, it is worthless. Take the shoe market. Clearly, you don’t want to market orthopedic shoes to teenagers. You can deck out the mailer with text messaging terms, pictures of X-Games, and use all the contemporary lingo, but it’s not a relevant message unless a teen needs to purchase a birthday present for grandpa.

 

   •    Know your customers, then market to what you know. When the National Hockey League began 1:1 communication with its customers, it asked them to fill out a survey that indicated that 40% of the of NHL’s fan base lives outside their favorite team’s home market. That means these fans can’t easily go to games or access highlights. Imagine the opportunity for the league! So ask yourself, what don’t you know about your customers now that might allow you to create relevance in a more powerful way later? Do a customer mail or email survey. Use what you find out to speak directly to the needs and interests of your customers.

 

Investing in your marketing database and developing an intimate understanding of your customers takes time, dedicated resources, and manpower, but it is one of the most important investments you can make. Personalization is a powerful tool, but to get the big pay-off, it cannot work alone.

 

 

Using the “Describe and Predict” Model

 

Want to knock your 1:1 (personalized) printing campaign out of the park? Do more than personalize the document. Use your data to describe and predict.

 

The process starts with understanding what your customers look like. Do a basic database analysis. What is their mix of ages, incomes, genders, and races? Where do they live? Then filter this customer information through general demographic and psychographic patterns to predict their behavior. Let’s look at a simplified example.

 

Say you are an auto dealership and discover that your lease customers fall into three basic categories: young singles, families, and retirees.

 

Because these are all current customers, you know their ages, incomes and ages of their children (if any) at the time of initial lease. You know their current vehicles and the options selected. This allows you to match appropriate upsells and cross-sells based on the likely needs of each group.

 

   •    In the young singles category, for example, it would be reasonable to assume that, after five years, they might have higher earning power. At the end of a five-year lease, you might be able to trade them up to the next class of vehicle with more options.

 

   •    In the families with young children category, you might assume that, after five years, they might have had more children. If they currently lease a sedan, they might need to move into something larger like a minivan or crossover vehicle. Families with older children might need to move into a vehicle with greater towing and storage capacity.

 

   •    In the retiree category, customers might be looking to downsize. Those with higher levels of disposable income might be looking for sportier cars or luxury vehicles.

 

In all cases, you know when the customer will act—at the end of the lease period. This information in hand, you can craft marketing campaigns with appropriate messages, offers and incentives.

 

Your customer base might look different than the one described here, of course, but you can use this process against your own customer mix. Just remember the letters “d” and “p”: describe, then predict.

 

 

3 Ways to Measure Success

 

It is always critical to quantify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. But how do you define success? Particularly with 1:1 printing, you have to use the right yardstick. If you are like most marketers, you might be used to thinking in terms of response rates, but let’s look at three less commonly used (but more critical) metrics to keep in mind.

 

1. Cost per lead. Typically, marketers are used to thinking about cost per piece, and with traditional direct mail in the $.10 range, it’s hard for 1:1 print marketing to compete on a cost basis. But everything changes when you look at what your program costs per lead rather than per piece.

 

If you mail 100,000 postcards at $.25 each (including postage), that’s a project cost of $25,000. If that campaign achieves a 1% response rate, that’s 250 leads at a cost of $100 per lead. On the other hand, if you mail 25,000 1:1 postcards at a cost of $1.00 each, that is still a project cost of $25,000. But if you achieve a 12% response rate, that’s 3,000 leads. Now your cost per lead drops to $8.33!

 

2. Cost per sale. Not all leads translate into sales. Divide the number of people who actually make a purchase into your total costs and this will give you the cost per sale. If only 33% of respondents to these hypothetical campaigns make a purchase, your cost per sale is $300 for the static campaign, while for the 1:1 campaign, it is $25.00.

 

3. Lifetime customer value. The value of the sale often goes beyond the initial purchase. If 1:1 personalization woos the buyer of one make of car to another, and if that customer becomes loyal to that brand, the return on investment from that piece includes the value of every car purchased by that customer over his or her lifetime. This is an important metric for marketers of long-term purchases, such as automobiles, financial products, and insurance.

 

The bottom line? Before you measure your results in any print campaign, make sure you understand all of the available measuring sticks, then use the one(s) that are the most impactful for you.

 

 

Can 1:1 Printing Save You Money? Yes!

 

Most marketers define the success of a print marketing campaign in terms of what they gain — responses, conversions, or dollars flowing into the cash register. But you can also define success by the money you save. Let’s look at three ways 1:1 printing can improve the bottom line through cost savings, not just boosting responses and revenues.

 

1. Lower cost of attrition. If your goal is to prevent customer attrition, you can evaluate the success of your campaign based on what sales stay rather than what sales merely come in. One marketer of high-end vacations saved millions, for example, by sending vacationers 100% personalized booklets that reinforce their vacation choices. Its cancellation rates plummeted, and it kept customer sales where they belonged — in its pockets.

 

2. Less handholding. What if you could use 1:1 printing to reduce calls to your customer service team? Questions about invoicing and payment cost real money. By personalizing its tax letters, for example, one state government’s tax bureau made these letters easier to read. The result was a noticeable drop in calls to its call centers, and the state saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

3. Faster response times. The faster customers pay, the better your cash flow. Take the example above. By using personalized printing to make its statements easier to read, this state government not only reduced the number of taxpayer calls, but it started receiving its revenues days earlier. As a result, it significantly boosted its earnings from interest.

 

Not included in this case study but very real to most marketers is the fact that more on-time payments also mean less time and money spent on duplicate invoicing and follow-up calls for non-payment.

 

Reducing customer attrition and making their invoices and customer statements easier to read and understand are not the “sexy” benefits of 1:1 printing we hear about the most, but they are real, bottom-line benefits that do not get talked about enough!

 

 

Some Customers Still Hard to Reach by Email

 

Did you know that, even in today’s multichannel media environment, some customer segments are more difficult to reach by email than others? For example . . .

 

    • 41% of U.S. consumers aged 65+ still do not have Internet access.

 

    • 53% of U.S. consumers in this group do not have broadband.

 

    • 18% of these consumers do not have smartphones.

 

Particularly for older retirees in lower income households, print remains a critical part of the multichannel mix. For many, it may be the only way to reach them. Even those who do go online may require text-only emails rather than the HTML versions many marketers are geared up to send.

 

But before you write off U.S. retirees as non-email-reading, non-Internet using consumers, remember that not all consumer segments look the same. In fact, among younger, more affluent, and more educated retirees, 90% have Internet access and 82% have broadband. That’s higher than the U.S. adult population overall. For this segment, email is an important tool for marketing communication, both as a primary means of messaging or as a follow-up to print communications.

 

So before you reach out, know your audience, their media use, and their channel preferences. It can have a critical impact on your multichannel mix.

Need help figuring it out? Give us a call.

 

 

5 Direct Mail “Must Dos”

 

Want to ensure that your direct mail is in line with today’s best practices? Here are 5 items that should be on every marketer’s “must do” list.

 

1. Focus on relevance, not volume: Marketers are moving away from commoditized, undifferentiated direct mail. They are leveraging customer demographics, purchase patterns, and preferences to increase response rates and drive revenue growth. According to a March 2014 study from Adobe,  “personalization” ranked #1 on marketers’ lists of priorities this year.

 

2. Sometimes less is more: By focus on creating relevance, not volume, this often means smaller, more targeted mailings. Only with personalized, relevance-based marketing can you mail less and get more.

 

3. Think efficiency: Better data cleansing and updating of mailing lists (eliminating UAA, or “undeliverable as addressed” mail) not only increases marketing efficiency, but it saves on postage, too.

 

4. Use triggered mail: Marketing effectiveness increases when you are mailing at the very time the customer is ready to buy. “Triggered” messaging does just that. Take an automotive manufacturer that sends out 1:1 mailers to alert customers when their vehicles are due for scheduled maintenance based on their last service call. Or a florist that advertises discounts to customers with family members with birthdays or anniversaries that week. Triggered mail magnifies the impact of personalization.

 

5. Be willing to stretch yourself: Don’t get stuck in a rut. In the same Adobe study, 54% of marketers said they believe the ideal marketer should take more risks and 45% hope to take more risks themselves. How will you know what works best for you if you don’t stretch yourself by trying something new once in awhile?

 

Talk to us about new ideas and new techniques for personalizing, using triggers, and increasing the relevance of your campaigns to boost your results.

 

1 “Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves” (Adobe, March 2014)

 

 

“Make It Easy for Me to Buy”

 

Want to boost responses to your marketing campaigns? Here is a simple tip. Tell people what you want them to do and make it easy for them to do it.

 

One of the most common mistakes marketers make, especially in direct mail, is burying the offer or forgetting to include a call to action. So get it out there. Every direct mailer or direct marketing piece should contain the following three elements:

 

1. The offer. What do you want people to do? Make a purchase? Call for a free consultation? Ask for the free information kit?

 

2. The call to action. Don’t assume people will know what you want them to do. Ask them to request a brochure, call for a free appointment, or sign up by scanning a QR Code.

 

3. Response mechanism. Make it easy to respond. If you are asking them to send away for more information, prefill the BRC with their name, addresses, and other information. If you want them to make a phone call, put the phone number to call in larger font or in a different color so it’s easy to find.

 

Assume that your audience is busy and you only have a few minutes of their time. Within just a few seconds of scanning the piece, they should know what you are selling, what action you want them to take, and how to do it.

 

Need help? Give us a call!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Motivates Charitable Giving?

 

If you are a nonprofit, you know how critical direct mail is to your fundraising efforts. But do you know what motivates your donors to give (or not)?

 

Most nonprofits might say that the most important factor is having a personal connection to the charity or to the recipient of the donation. But according to YouGov’s “Giving Report 2013,” it’s trust.

 

When asked the biggest factor that motivates them to donate,

 

• 12% of those giving to charities cited “trusting a charity/nonprofit”;

 

• 8% cited “seeing a child, adult, or animal which will directly benefit from my gift”; and

 

• 6% cited “easily seeing exactly how and where my money will be spent.”

 

The single biggest deterrent to giving? Inflated salaries and excessive administrative expenses followed uncertainty about how the money would be spent.

 

Next time you send out a fundraiser, think through the issues of trust and personal connection carefully. How can you tweak your message so that it focuses not just on the mission of your organization but any projects you might be working on? Also work in issues related to trust. While donors want to know how their money will be spent, only 3% said that “easily being able to do their own due diligence” was a motivator for giving a donation. It’s up you to get that message across.

 

Need help planning your next giving campaign? Give us a call!

 

 

 

High-Performing Companies Focus on Personalization

 

What makes a high-performing company a high-performing company? According to a survey of more than 1,000 marketers, it’s a focus on personalizing customer experiences and using metrics to drive the creation of their creative.

 

According to Adobe’s “Digital Roadblocks: 2014,” when asked about their most important success factors, marketers gave the following answers:

 

• Their CEO understands marketing (73%)

 

• Marketing is becoming more important to their company (81%)

 

• They are “completely” or “very” focused on personalizing customer experiences (63%)

 

• Data (metrics from ads, campaigns, website, and so on) is “strongly informative” in evolving their marketing creative (28%)

 

Great marketing doesn’t just happen. It’s a strategic efforts that involves creative, commitment, and effective use of data. Great marketing also starts with a commitment from the top. Just ask the best marketers around.

 

Need help combining elements of personalization and metrics-driven creative in producing your next print or multichannel campaign? Give us a call!

 

 

 

 

Tear-Off Cards Make Responses Easy

 

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 readily available information (recipient’s name, address, product serial numbers, seminar dates) to make responses as easy as possible?

 

If you are sending blank forms, 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 respond, the more likely they are to do it.

 

Take the example of one marketer that 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, most of the registrations were still coming through the company’s website or sales reps, not the direct mailers it was paying for.

 

The marketer 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 cards in the mail. The company received such a bump in its registrations that it had to add an extra seminar session!

 

If you are sending reply cards, there is no reason not to pre-fill them. After all, the data you need is most likely in your marketing database already, and we have the skills and the equipment to make the entire process easy for you.

 

Want to get a quick and easy boost to your response rates? Talk to us about prefilling the response forms and reply cards in your next print campaign!

 

 

Use Multi-Touch Campaigns Boost Response Rates

 

One of the most effective ways to boost your response rates is sending strategic, multi-touch campaigns. This approach uses multiple contacts with the same or different media to build your message over time.

 

Often, these contacts are layered in three stages:

 

1. Priming the pump (“Watch for our exciting offer!”)

 

2. Presentation of the message

 

3. Follow-up or reminder to respond

 

This is not a formula that you should apply rigidly, and not all programs will utilize the same elements. But it’s a good, general rule of thumb that has proven very successful.

 

Take the example of a private school that wanted increase its donations. It developed a multi-touch campaign that stretched over several weeks.

The program included:

 

• General awareness letter to introduce the campaign and its financial goal

 

• First, second, and third appeal letters, with personalized data based on child, grade level, teacher, recipient’s past giving history, and progress toward the goal

 

• Postcard alerting families to an upcoming Phone-A-Thon

 

• Phone-A-Thon follow-up card

 

• Final appeal letter

 

Using this approach, the school reached its financial goal three months early, and overall, achieved new records for revenue and participation.

 

Not all multi-touch, multi-channel campaigns have this many elements, but this campaign shows the power that repeated, reinforced communications have to boost revenue, combined with the trust that many organizations, especially nonprofits, have in this approach.

 

Want to boost revenues using a multi-touch campaign? Give us a call!

 

 

 

 

Maximize Your Marketing Dollars with This Simple Tip

 

It’s a standard rule of thumb in marketing. It costs 10 times less to keep the customers you have than to generate new ones. This means one of the best uses of your marketing dollars is to maintain customer loyalty. One of the easiest ways to do that is to use customer surveys.

 

What makes customer surveys so effective?

 

• They make customers feel valued.

 

• They provide an opportunity to learn about customer habits and purchasing patterns.

 

• If there is a problem with the customer relationship, they open the door to correct it.

 

How often should you survey? Some marketers survey their customers on an as-needed basis. Their goal might be to understand different customer behaviors, such as a drop in sales or a shift in purchasing patterns, or to get to know their customers better in order to drive 1:1 personalization programs. Others have an ongoing commitment to customer surveys, such as sending annual questionnaires “just because” or follow-ups after each sale to monitor customer satisfaction.

 

Regardless of which approach works best for you, customer surveys are a valuable tool for maintaining the loyalty of those customers who help your bottom line the most.

 

Need to send a customer survey?

Ask us! We can help.