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.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.

John Wooden

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.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

Vince Lombardi

Setting Expectations for Personalized Print

There is not doubt — we love personalized print. We love it because it works. What’s important, however, is understanding why it works. Personalized print doesn’t boost response rates simply because it’s driven by data.

When you look at the case studies and Webinars for these campaigns, you will often see phenomenal response rates.  In one report, they ranged from 6% to 75%, with an average of 21%. These are some powerful numbers. However, in order to understand why and how individual campaigns achieve such high numbers and whether yours is likely to do the same, you need to ask certain questions.

• What was the application? Different applications tend to bring different response rates.
• What kind of mailing list did the marketer start with? Highly targeted, moderately targeted, or undifferentiated lists will yield different results.
• Did recipients have a previous relationship with the company?
• What is the value of the product?
• Did per-order value go up with personalization, and if so, by how much?
• How is the marketer evaluating success (on a campaign-by-campaign basis or lifetime customer value)?

The answers to such questions can have a dramatic impact on ROI. For example, if you are asking respondents to log into a personalized URL to fill out a survey or provide information to a company they already do business with, you can expect higher response rates than if you are doing a prospecting campaign.

So before setting your expectations for your next personalized print mailing, talk to us about your goals, your expectations, and the data you are working with. Setting realistic expectations is a critical component to making your 1:1 print program a success.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

If you try to do something and fail, you are vastly better off than if you had tried nothing and succeeded

Anonymous