Master Print Communications
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News & Announcements
Should you be customer profiling?
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.
How does it work?
To create targeted campaigns, marketers typically do a basic select by some kind of relevant demographic. A travel agency might select consumers of retirement age, for example, because they tend to have more leisure time. Customer profiles take this a step further, layering on home ownership, median home value and other factors that provide insight into disposable income. It might include whether or not they have purchased a vacation in the past.
How do you develop a profile of your customers?
Smaller marketers often have little data to work with, but tools for getting around this are exploding.
1. You can purchase data cuts of increased detail.
For a few more dollars per thousand, you can purchase a more refined data select than a single cut. In the earlier example, this might be a list of consumers aged 65 or older who own homes worth at least $150,000 and have purchased at least one vacation in the past 12 months. The trick is to balance the increased cost of the data with the likelihood that it will bring a greater return. This is where testing becomes critical. The more you test, the more you know what brings additional value and what does not.
2. You can append your existing list with additional data.
If you have an existing customer list, you can do what is called an “append,” or purchase additional data on those same customers that will create a relevant customer profile. You can do this even if you have nothing but an e-mail list. It’s called a “reverse append.”
3. You can purchase complete customer profiles from list companies like Accudata, Nielsen and Dun & Bradstreet.
These companies are increasingly providing packaged solutions aimed at helping small and mid-sized business owners with an overall demographic overview of customers who spend the most money in their markets. These include both standard selects like median household income and business standard industrial classification (SIC), as well as proprietary categories like “wealth scores” and “super niches.” Customer profiling sounds like a scary word, but even for smaller marketers, it doesn’t have to be. Talk to us about creating a customer profile and taking your targeted and personalized marketing to the next level.
Do you know how to effectively use response boosters?
What this means is that personalization gets you in the door. It grabs attention. In the eyes of the recipient, it marks the communication as relevant or interesting. But there are many things that can occur between the time the mailer catches someone’s eye and the time that person responds.
If you look through a series of case studies on 1:1 print marketing, whether using personalized URLs (PURLs) or other forms of personalization, marketers with the highest response rates tend not to rely on variable fields alone to motivate recipients to action. There is always some other element present that synergizes with the variable information to make it happen. For example, when a high-profile manufacturer of software for 1:1 printing and cross-media solutions wanted to promote attendance at its trade show booth, it used PURLs as the response mechanism to gather information and track responses. Nearly half of recipients—48%—registered for the event or separate publicity raffle. But the drivers were not due solely to the PURL itself. First, the marketer started with a well-qualified list of prospects. Then it used a Starbucks gift card as an incentive to respond. Finally, it followed up with a personalized e-mail to non-responders.
Common Response Boosters
Let’s look at some of the most common, industry-wide techniques that marketers combine with personalization to maximize response rates.
1. Targeted audience. High response rates are most often the result of having a highly targeted audience that, by virtue of demographics or psychographics, is more likely than average to respond. A home furnishings company, for example, might target first-time homeowners. A lawn care company might send specials on lawn care kits to existing customers who recently purchased a high volume of grass seed.
2. Use of unusual design elements.
Personalization can have a powerful impact, but only if people see it. To attract recipients’ attention in the first place, marketers often start with unusual design elements, such as oversized postcards, clear envelopes or lumpy mail.
3 Utilization of multiple media.
Effective campaigns use multiple media to reinforce the message and remind people to respond. The use of personalized follow-up e-mails is a common technique.
4. High value incentive.
This technique is common in applications using PURL campaigns, especially campaigns for lead generation or information gathering, such as customer feedback or prospect surveys. To motivate recipients to respond, marketers might offer a gift or monetary incentive, such as a restaurant gift card or entry into a sweepstakes.
Pick Your Team! Personalization is a powerful tool, but it’s not a magic wand. Just as we don’t expect athletes to carry their team to glory all by themselves, you shouldn’t expect personalization to carry the load alone, either. Like all marketing elements, personalization works best when it is part of a collective effort. Find out more about how 1:1 marketing can become part of your marketing success strategy.
Posted on Aug 12, 2010. Web-to-Print Takes Brochure Printing to New Heights
ThermaTru, a fiberglass and steel exterior door systems company wants to save time and money on their brochure marketing material production. The goal is to create an east-to-use system for managers and distributors to create customized print. The solution the company applied did much more than maintain the quality and consistency of the corporate materials.
ThermaTru trimmed costs and boosted effectiveness by reducing the production time of their brochure. Once their Web-to-Print service was launched live, production time was reduced from months to less than one month. Within the first two months of its launch, 36 builders and distributors had already created several hundred pages for brochures. The ability to create brochures online through a Web-to-Print solution has enabled an ease of use for builders and distributors.
For some time, ThermaTru had been using multi-page, full-color brochures as sales aids for custom builders and distributors. These brochures are then used at home improvement stores. The amount of manual processing and time that it took to create the brochures, in addition to the design process, was consuming and inefficient. ThermaTru’s printer designed a custom Web-to-print system that would accommodate these elements and expedite the workflow. When a distributor or builder enters the custom site, they can either use an already created brochure, or create a brochure themselves using an image bank, templates and specification options. They are then directed to a page count and pricing page.
The brochure is first customized with the front cover, which is built by choosing from different cover designs from a library of over a hundred images or images that the user has uploaded. The user’s logo is then customized onto the cover, while the layout adjusts to the desired graphics and marketing messages. Next, the inside pages of the brochure are integrated from over 40 layout options that include up to 21 images on one page. Copy of the brochure is also chosen from a list of pre-approved marketing messages. Lastly, the user customizes the back cover from a choice of three templates with various marketing messages, images and products. The last step of the program directs the user to a confirmation page where the user can preview the proof and check out.
The dynamism of the Web-to-Print is one of the several reasons for its success. The ease of use and the ability to oversee and control the variations of content help tailor the brochures to target recipients and to accommodate locations and distributors. The brochure printing is done on the Xerox iGen4 digital press, which helps to maintain color consistency and a high resolution of the images. To learn more about how Web-to-print can be a solution for your company’s print collateral management, visit our Web-to-Print services.
Experts Discuss the Future of Direct Mailing
Keywords: advertising, marketing, direct mail, USPS, Twitter, social networking, direct marketing, postcard printing
Posted on Aug 06, 2010. Don’t you LOVE green printing?
For starters, you can minimize environmentally hazardous materials in your print pieces. Recycled, post-consumer waste and FSC certified papers are heavily available at most printers. If you have a project with size specific requirements, ask your printer what the most effective sheet or web-roll size is available to meet your needs.
Vegetable and soy based inks are available for offset commercial printing jobs, while digital printing uses a low VOC toner. When you choose offset jobs and print with petroleum based inks, you are using a toxic substance that contains carcinogens, chemicals known to cause cancer. Another type of ink that you should steer from is metallic and fluorescent ink. The pigments in these inks contain harmful elements like heavy metals, barium, copper and zinc. In terms of paper coatings, when considering book cover printing, brochure printing, flyer printing or any other printing that requires a coating, choose varnish, bio-degradable or aqueous based coatings instead of press varnish or film lamination.
Print design elements and paper size will impact your material consumption. Choose a finished paper size that will allow you to make an efficient use out of the standard paper sizes. If you are printing flyers or even handbooks, then design your printed piece, so that any supporting information is online and then direct the traffic to your site. Presentation slide placement can go 3-up, 4-up or even 6-up per page to reduce space. Margin space can also be reduced, whenever possible. A great example is page reduction. If you use ½ instead of ¾ page margins on a 200 page book, you will reduce the page count to approximately 180 pages. Font size can also help. Obviously, you want something readable and a good rule of thumb is 10 pt for Arial/Helvetica and 11 pt for Times New Roman. Books and handouts should be printed on both sides of the sheet for paper reduction.
You printer will give you the option to see printed proofs or to view your proofs online. Connect with the printer to drop by and see, touch and feel the paper stock and then proof your work online. Also, ask your printer if you can choose binding elements that are eco-friendly. These options should be available to you as recycled plastic coil and post consumer waste plastics. In terms of runs, try to print only what you need. Digital printing highlights this feature and enables you to utilize on demand production. Another feature of digital printing is Variable Data Printing. Targeting your print marketing materials to specific individuals reduces the printed quantity needed with most pieces. This is conjoined with cleansing and updating your mailing lists. Segment that which will benefit most from the materials.
Lastly, speak up! Tell the people about your green printing choices and encourage them to recycle your print materials once they are done using them. If you are having an event, demonstrate your green efforts and place recycling containers around the premises, to direct people to join the “greening.”
Want to do a green direct mail campaign? Email kate@mp4print, to get started.
Posted on Aug 03, 2010.
