The Power of Personalization

"Personalization is not a trend. It is a marketing tsunami, here to stay,…" Forbes magazine 2015

People are fed up being constantly bombarded by useless, impersonal mass-marketing messages. They struggle to keep their individuality wanting only a smidgen of acknowledgement, appreciation and respect. That's what makes personalization so powerful…it recognizes their individuality.

The following postcard includes 10 simple personalization elements using the sport shop's customer database. Can you identify them?

 

Click to enlarge

#1 & #2 – The recipient's name is used in the text on the front and back. While this is very simple element to use is so commonplace in 2015, it can be a turn-off if used without further personalization.

#3 & #4 – The sport shop's database indicates the recipient, Michelle, previously purchased women's golf equipment and clothing. The name "Michelle" indicates the recipient is female with a 99% degree of certainty. This information suggests the use an image of a female golfer to make an instant visual "connection" with Michelle.

#5 & #6 – Similarly, the message focuses on women's golf clothing with a picture of such clothing on the front and back.

#7 & #8 – The "unadvertised" message strongly implies the store recognizes Michelle as a previous (and valued) customer. The "online" code acknowledges that Michelle buys online as well as in the store.

#9 – The return address shows the location and phone number for the retail store closest to Michelle's mailing address rather than a corporate address.

#10 – This is a message personalized for Michelle. Therefore, the terribly impersonal slight, "Or Current Occupant", makes no sense and has been eliminated from the address.

Michelle could hardly miss the fact that the sports shop knows who she is and is working to offer her things she wants. You shouldn't miss the techniques used to track response to the postcard. If you don't see it, give us a call.

Make Your Print Customers Green

You do your part to be an environmentally friendly printer with your inks, toners, paper, recycling, production techniques, etc. and you'd like your customers to know about your efforts. Your print customers may also want recognition for the many environmentally friendly efforts they undertake. Now, you can join with your customers in taking positive steps to help the environment and show how you all work consciously to reduce the stress on our planet and its resources.

It's a commonsense and free concept called Greener Printing. There are no rules, no tests, no memberships and no fees. You simply work with your customer to communicate smarter - more efficiently and effectively. Shaving just a few pounds of weight from a mailing helps to save resources and minimizes waste. Being more selective with messages and recipients helps minimize non-productive communications…and often saves money.

There's nothing radical or complicated about Greener Printing…just engage with your print customers to do what makes sense. You might also include electronic media as part of the discussion since emails and social media have an impact on the environment that is surprisingly high. 

Promote Greener Printing by using the logo for your business and by using the logo on your customers' materials to show their commitment to environmentally friendly communications. The point is to generate attention and discussion about the broad topic of smarter communications. 

Read more and get started with Greener Printing at www.greenerprinting.org

Why Handwriting Fonts Look Fake

 

Even the best handwriting fonts can be spotted as fakeries almost instantly. The reason lies partly with the fonts but a bigger problem comes from the way the fonts are used.

 

Humans don't write like a word processor or printing press. Human handwriting is a mashup of imperfections, inconsistencies and individuality. We tend to ignore such facts about human handwriting: 

 

• It isn't perfectly left justified – and center justification is simply impossible
• Characters don't follow straight lines or parallel lines
• Text is not aligned at right angles to the paper
• Character and word spacing is inconsistent
• Character sizes vary randomly…etc.

All of these points are largely independent of the font used. So, if you want your handwriting font to look more realistic…mess things up! It takes some effort to do this in a word processor such as MS Word, but in a vector graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator, it's pretty simple.

Don't think, however, that you now have the solution to making realistic-looking handwriting with a font. You still have to address the part of the problem originating with font: identical characters. When characters repeat such as in "too", "see", "all" and "bookkeeper", it's very easy to see the characters are identical. Once the reader recognizes the first set of identical characters, he/she will know the handwriting isn't real.

Of course, the easiest technique for getting a real handwriting look is to scan some real handwriting. This works fine…until you need to print hundreds or thousands of pieces with variable text.

If you need realistic-looking handwriting using variable text (as in variable data printing) that you print, check out our handwriting font-app. It's great for printing hand-addressed envelopes, creating personal notes and postcards, printing on sticky-notes, etc.

Read more about our realistic handwriting fonts...

Data Management Delivers Huge Cost Savings

Reduce your customer’s job cost by $10,000 and you’re certain to get some kudos. If $10,000 cuts the job cost in half, you’re likely to have that customer’s business for a long, long time. It’s unlikely, however, that you’re going to achieve such huge savings without doing something differently such as using the customer’s data more efficiently and effectively. We’ve helped lots of print shops deliver dramatic savings to customers (and higher profits for themselves). You’ll see in the following example how simple and straightforward it is.

Say you have a hypothetical customer who manages 100 offices (stores, outlets, salespeople or whatever). Your hypothetical customer wants to announce a special offer (sale, discount, opportunity or whatever) to the top 100 customers for each the 100 offices. The offer is exactly the same for all customers and is to be made via direct mail postcards with each local offices’ return address on the postcards.

There are two basic ways to accomplish this

1)  Your hypothetical customer sends text and artwork so each office can have postcards printed and mailed to its’ top 100 customers (literally, 100 static postcard mailing jobs), or

2)  You use some data management and a little VDP to do the entire mailing as a single job.

A simple “back of the cocktail napkin” estimate suggests that option 1) would have a total cost to your hypothetical customer of approximately $20,000 or $200 for each of the 100 offices. We estimate the $200 this way. Postage for the one hundred 6” x 9”postcards is almost $50. Each office likely spends at least $50 (one hour or more) in time to manage the job and get material, artwork and its mailing list to the local print shop. The local print shop would have to set up the artwork and print file (at least adding the return address), printing, cutting, addressing, putting postage on and mailing the 100 postcards. We guesstimate the print shop would charge at least $1 per postcard or $100. The price tag for your hypothetical customer ends up at $20,000 ($50 postage + $50 office time + $100 print & mail cost times 100 offices).

Alternatively, you might do the same (or better) job for $10,000 or less. Here’s how…

Your hypothetical customer gives you the 100 mailing lists. You combine them into a single, clean and formatted list of 10,000 addresses pre-sorted for a Standard mailing. You set up your artwork and do a simple VDP merge that applies the various return and mailing addresses. Print, cut, sort and mail the 10,000 postcards. We estimate that costs: 

$2,800 in postage (saving $2,000 for presorted Standard vs First Class)
$1,500 ($15 worth of time per office) to have the 100 mailing lists emailed to your hypothetical customer, and
$700* for data management work (merging, cleansing formatting & presorting).

That leaves $5,000 of our $10,000 estimated cost for digital printing, cutting, sorting and mailing the 10,000 postcards. Besides a substantial cost reduction, your hypothetical customer will also know that all the postcards were mailed (or which didn’t) and on what date. There won’t be any need to check up on 100 different offices for status updates. 

This not-so-hypothetical example demonstrates the job cost savings potential of combining data or mailing lists. There’s no magic or mystery. It’s simply taking advantage of economies of scale while also avoiding multiple “per job” or minimum costs. While you'll probably never be faced with a hundred mailing lists, even combining a half dozen lists can yield cost savings of 40 to 50% on some jobs.

Keep your eyes (and mind) open.  Opportunities for significant cost savings with data or mail list combining are actually fairly common but too often overlooked. Of course, if you need help with data management, VDP print files or optimizing a data-combination job, just give us a call.

* If this seems like a lot, consider how many combinations and permutations of formatting, arrangement, font, case, file type, etc. you can get when 100 people independently prepare their own mailing lists. While not technically challenging, it requires time and care to conform that many lists.

Mining a Mailing List for Gold

Most people see a mailing list as a simple collection of names and addresses. We see a mailing list as an opportunity to know your customers or recipients better. This knowledge makes it possible to focus your message, promotions or appeals to match and provide more value to the recipient. And, making your communication valuable is key to increasing response rates, selling more products and services, receiving more donations, acquiring new customers…whatever your communication goal might be. In the following, we explore some of the “gold” you can get from your mailing list.

Geographic Location – The town or city and street addresses provide you details such as the school district, local schools, voting district, fire and tax districts, cable, water, sewer and utility companies, etc. for those addresses.

Location Demographics – While a town/city and street addresses provides specific information about locations they also give a reasonable idea about the demographics of those living at those locations. For example, it’s easy to identify the relative affluence of neighborhoods or different areas. This information then suggests with reasonable certainty characteristics such as minimum annual income, typical education level, home value, etc. Regardless the business, this if often very valuable to identify target audiences or target areas.

Residence type – Residence type (apartment versus single family home) often provides good clues about a person’s lifestyle. For example, apartment dwellers typically do not own lawn mowers or have need for landscaping, roofing, plumbing or electrical services. The opposite is true for those living in single family dwellings. Addresses that include “Apt.”, “Bldg.”, “Unit”, etc. are most likely apartments and may be identified as such by the USPS address processing software.

Prefixes – Prefixes can tell you about the recipient’s gender, likely marital status, education level and occupation. “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, “Miss” and “Ms.” are dead giveaways for gender and potential indicators of marital status for women (don’t take the marital status as a certainty, however). “Rev”, “Fr” (Father), “Dr”, “Atty”, “Prof”, Hon (Honorable) and the whole gamut of military ranks provide good clues about occupation and possibly education level.

Suffixes - Suffixes are sometimes called post nominal letters meaning “letters after the name”. They might start to look like alphabet soup, but they can tell you a lot about the recipient. Some common suffixes include “J.D.” and “Esq. (lawyers), “MD”, “OD”, “DO” and “DMD” (doctors), “CPA”, “CMA” and “ABA” (accountants)…and there are hundreds more! Suffixes provide very specific detail about occupation and education level which can be assumed to a relative gauge of income level and other characteristics.

Gender – Having a gender field (male/female or M/F) in a mailing list is a huge benefit since gender is a major differentiation for many communications. It might be sexist, but very few men like to shop for women’s undergarments. Similarly, not many women shop for hi-performance truck accessories. If your mailing list doesn’t have a gender field, there are techniques for creating one from the addressees’ names.

Do you ask customers about their mailing lists? Some of them might be quite interested to know more about their customer base or their market. This information helps determine if they are sending the wrong message, sending to the wrong audience or missing a key element to get more attention or business. You simply can’t know without mining the gold from a mailing list.

We can help you with this. PrintShopMarketing.com

Re-Think Mailing

It’s no surprise. Given the general downturn in mailing volume (see graph below), many print shop owners are questioning why they should spend several thousand dollars to renew their address presort and processing software. That question usually leads to other questions about printing and VDP software as well all of the time, cost and risk of doing mailing jobs. Add to those more questions about what’s in store regarding the USPS’ delayed Full Service Intelligent Mail Barcode program.

Fortunately, we have an answer. You can outsource all of your data merge and clean up, address list processing and print file creation work to us. You do what you do best: design, printing, finishing, etc. You simply send us mailing lists and artwork. We do all the hard stuff and deliver to you pre-addressed and pre-sorted, printer-ready VDP files imposed and ordered the way you want.

That means there is no software to buy, learn, update or renew or specials skills to learn. It also means you and your staff have more time to do important things such as selling, serving customers and all those things that make your business profitable. You also will likely also come to realize that by outsourcing you have gained a whole new set of capabilities from more data and data management services to all types of personalization and advanced VDP solutions.

Is it time for you to re-think your mailing process? If it is, give us a call.

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