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

With E-mail, Who Needs Print?

It’s true—e-mail is inexpensive, easy to personalize and highly trackable. The trend however is toward cross media, with marketers using the best of multiple media to reinforce one another. But with the success of e-mail, some marketers might be tempted to jettison print altogether. Is this the right choice?

As you allocate your marketing resources, here are some things to consider.

1. Differences in e-mail databases. People change e-mail addresses more frequently than they do physical addresses. Thus, you must keep e-mail addresses up to date much more often, especially in the B2B marketplace. Data mining experts indicate that predictive analysis also tends to be more accurate for direct mail than for e-mail, and customer retention rates tend to be higher.

2. Direct mail tends to generate higher revenues. Although there are exceptions, more multi-media campaigns include e-mail as a marketing component than direct mail (79.1% for e-mail vs. 75.4% for direct mail). However, direct mail generated 29% of the revenue, compared to 21.6% for e-mail.

3. Print mail sticks around. The 1:1 industry abounds with stories of marketers who send out smart personalized campaigns, and while recipients to the campaign might not need the product or service immediately, they keep the mailer for future reference. They might wait for a year or more, but when they are ready, they act on it. When was the last time you heard that about an e-mail?

Perhaps this is why, despite the proliferation of e-mail, direct mail continues to grow.

So don’t over-emphasize e-mail to the exclusion of print . When evaluating the metrics of both options, compare apples to apples. Put more weight on measurements, such as cost per lead, dollars generated per sale and ROI than on more generic measurements. You might find that the most cost-effective solution isn’t always what it might seem.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

There are no secrets to success.  It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.

Colin Powell

Old Trail Printing wins 17 awards for Print Excellence

Old Trail Printing is proud to announce it was recently awarded seventeen (17) 2014 Print Excellence Awards from the Printing Industries of Ohio / N. Kentucky.

Printing Industries Association President, Jim Cunningham stated how impressed this year’s judges were with the overall quality of all of the entries.  “Paul and Glenn are experienced judges and printers whose combined expertise spans more than 75 years of print.  Yet, even they were impressed with our members’ incredible work.  It’s easy in today’s fast paced world to just get the job done, but our Association members continue to demonstrate the pride and dedication to their craft that has made Ohio and northern Kentucky printers some of the best in the world!”

Each year, Printing Industries of Ohio / N. Kentucky holds its Print Excellence Awards Competition to reward Ohio and northern Kentucky printers that demonstrate excellence in 34 categories.  This year member companies submitted over 500 printed pieces and two out-of-state expert judges ranked them in a regional competition.  This year’s judges were Paul Schmitz, Schmitz Printing Inc. and Glenn Petry.

Each of the gold award winners in the regional competition are entered in an association-wide competition for Best of Category and Best of Show prizes that will be awarded in September 2014 at the Grand Ceremony being held in Columbus, Ohio.

Old Trail Printing won the following awards:

            11 Gold Awards

            6 Silver Awards

Founded in 1928 and one of the largest woman owned printers in the Midwest, Old Trail Printing has a rich history of servicing clients across the country. Our combination of offset and digital presses means we have the right equipment to handle a variety of projects. In addition to being recognized as an award winning printer, we have invested in technology tools that enable our customers to streamline their procurement processes, increase efficiencies, reduce waste and gain a higher return on investment with their printed communications. With our comprehensive list of services our customers benefit from using Old Trail as their single source for creative, printing, mailing, fulfillment and more.

Printing Industries of Ohio / N.Kentucky serves nearly 300 commercial printing companies and suppliers to the industry in its service area. The Association provides a broad range of products and services to its membership, including workers’ compensation and product discounts. Printing Industries of Ohio / N.Kentucky is an affiliate of the national Printing Industries of America, the largest graphic arts association in the world. For complete information on Printing Industries of Ohio / N.Kentucky and Printing Industries of America, please visit www.pianko.org.  

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”  

 Maya Angelou

Benefiting From Customer Surveys

What could you learn by conducting customer surveys or focus groups more often? The number of doors of opportunity opened by the information gathered from these efforts might surprise you.

As part of its 1-1 marketing effort, the National Hockey League asked fans to register on its website and select their favorite team. One of the things the NHL immediately discovered was that 40% of its fan base lives outside their favorite team’s home market. That means that they can’t regularly attend local games, access highlights or view the games on television.

Imagine the opportunity for the NHL! Say the League identifies Detroit Red Wings fans that live outside of Michigan. If Red Wings games are not available on television outside of Michigan, the League could send these fans an e-mail explaining how they can watch their favorite team on the NHL’s Center Ice, its on-demand broadcasting service.

Reeling Them Back In

There is much you can learn from online survey forms or customer surveys of the type that has been so beneficial to the NHL. But there is much you can learn from surveying your inactive customers, too. Why have these individuals stopped shopping with you? Are they shopping somewhere else? What attracted them to their new supplier? Wouldn’t you want to know?

One of the techniques marketers often use to boost sales is sending special promotions to customers who haven’t purchased with them within a certain time frame. How much more effective would these promotions be if you could target the offer to the very reason the customer stopped shopping with you in the first place?

Say a high percentage of customers cite price as the reason for jumping ship. You could offer them a discount to bring them back on board. Or you could try a longer-term incentive, such as offering to enroll them in a customer loyalty program that would provide discounts and special deals over the lifetime of that relationship.

Find out what your customers think. While 1:1 print personalization, in itself, will boost marketing effectiveness, pairing it with relevance based on a deeper understanding of your customer base can send that effectiveness off the charts.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves, they have the first secret of success. 

Norman Vincent Peale

3 Steps to Data Mining

Data mining. It is the foundation of great personalized marketing, but it strikes fear into the hearts of many marketers. The reality is that this fear is unfounded since data mining is well within the grasp of any sized marketer.

Let’s break it down into three simple steps. 

1. Find out what’s in there.

The first step is to understand the field headings in your database. Most databases have basic information like name, address and purchase history. Are you also capturing information such as age, gender and home ownership? What data do you actually have?

2. Ask questions.

Knowing what data you have tells you the types of queries you can run. Running queries simply means asking questions of the data. If you are a retailer you might ask, “Which customers purchased hardwood flooring last month?” If you know that these customers are also likely to purchase area rugs and floor conditioning products, this gives you a great start.

3. Look for relationships.

The next step is to run data sorts. Is there a relationship between hardwood flooring and gender? How about income? Are customers more likely to purchase hardwood flooring at different times of year than others?

Even basic software like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access provides sorting capabilities. Or you might want to purchase add-on data mining modules or third-party software. If you need to outsource, there are plenty of companies that specialize in this process for very reasonable costs.

Get Curious!

So get curious. Take a few hours to run a variety of sorts just to see what you can find.

Once you know what’s in your data, you’ve asked questions of your data, and discovered relationships within the data, it’s time to act on what you find. That curiosity could make a big difference to the bottom line.

 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

 

We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Walt Disney

 

 

Case Studies: Consumers Use QR Codes

QR Codes give shoppers and other consumers access marketing or product information from their mobile phones, but do consumers actually prefer them? Will they scan these codes when other ways to access the information are available? For many, the answer is yes!

Let’s look at three real-life examples:

1. One marketer sent a holiday card to its customers with an invitation to login to a personalized URL to select a charity to receive a donation in their name. Of those responding to the campaign, 11% chose to log in by scanning a QR Code rather than typing in the personalized URL.

2. An online educational institution serving the high school market wanted to boost enrollment. It sent a promotional campaign inviting students and their parents to log in to a personalized URL to learn more about online education and enter a sweepstakes to win an iPad2.  More than one-third (37%) of the logins came via QR Code.

3. In order to refresh its retail location, an herbal supplements and vitamin company wanted to find out what products and services its customers were looking for that might be missing from its existing mix. To find out, it sent a survey via personalized URL to nearly 20,000 contacts. QR Code scans accounted for almost 20% of all PURL visitors.

We could give lots more examples, but you get the idea. People love mobile, but they don’t love typing in long web addresses. If you provide them with a way to skip right to the content they are looking for, they’ll very likely to take it, especially when they are responding to a personalized URL campaign. That’s a huge benefit of QR Codes.

This can also lead to an elevated response rate to the overall campaign. Why? Because the easier it is to respond to a marketing message (including multiple ways to respond), the more responses you’re going to get.  

Jeff Lampert
Director of Marketing & Business Development

The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas of enthusiasm. – Thomas J. Watson

Don’t Overlook Your Employees

When it comes to personalized printing, marketers’ primary focus is on customers . . . as well it should be.  The use of data to increase relevance, drive conversions, and increase audience engagement is one of the primary benefits of this technology. But have you ever thought about using the same benefits of personalized print communications to serve your own internal audience—your employees?

1to1 Magazine recently published an interesting article called “Beyond the Suggestion Box” talking about the importance of employee engagement. While the topic might sound mundane, it is actually a critical issue. Employee engagement and company profitability are closely tied. The more engaged a company’s employees are, the more profitable it tends to be.

Despite this connection . . .

·        Only one-quarter of employees at large companies are highly engaged (The Temkin Group)

·        18% of full-time workers in the U.S. are actively disengaged in their work; and

·        52% are not involved in, enthusiastic about, or committed to their work (Gallup)

These low levels of engagement should be a real concern to U.S. businesses. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to improve the engagement of your employees within your organization. If engagement is already high, these same steps can help it grow even more.

Ask their opinion.  Use printed surveys or for topics on which employees may want credit for their input and ideas, you may want to use personalized URLs.

Send individualized cards and gifts on birthdays, anniversaries (including anniversary of their employment start date), and other special occasions.

Publicize how their input and the input of others is being acted upon. Use newsletters, posters, and other print communications to spread the word and let them know that their opinions being heard.

Personalized printing is a valuable tool for communicating with your most important audiences. Your employees should be one of them!

 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

 

Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you’re not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were. – David Rockefeller