Talk Data to Me

Don’t get this confused with the 1980 adult comedy, “Talk Dirty to Me”. 

You should consider talking “data” to your customers. The industry experts have finally started to address an issue we’ve identified for years…data and communications are inseparable.

Your customers can’t communicate with or keep track of their customers, donors, supporters, etc. without data. Customer data can be simple such as mailing, email and contact lists or more sophisticated such as CRMs, donor software or custom datasets.

Moreover, data tends to be dynamic. Contacts come and go. People make purchases, donations, inquiries, etc. At some point, all data needs to be cleansed, merged, de-duped, sorted, formatted, appended, enhanced or some or all of these.

Where do your customers go when they need help with their data? Many don’t go anywhere. They muddle along with poor data…with inefficient data…with some data they can’t use. You have customers wanting help with their data or ideas to use their data more effectively. Why don’t you help them?

Learn some basic data-related terminology and you’re ready to start talking about data with your customers. What type of data (e.g. mailing lists, CRMs, etc.) are they using? How do they expand and maintain their data? Who does that? How do they do it? Do they have any problems with their data? Are there things they want do but can’t? You get the idea.

What makes this so simple is that you let experts do the actual data work for you. Send the data and the customers’ requirements to the experts who use their expertise and software and send the improved data back to you. Have any questions about data, they have the answers. What’s more, there’s no software to buy or learn.

You’ll be surprised by some of the reactions you get when you starting talking about data with your customers. Some of your customers will have been waiting a long time to have that discussion. They’ll start by telling you all of the problems they have and what they want to do (or can’t do) with their data. In reality, what they are doing is explaining all of the opportunities they have for you. Don’t worry. You don’t have to answer any questions on the spot and you always have your experts backing you up.

Being a data solutions provider (DSP) immediately sets you apart from the competition. Customers will never again look at you as simply a print vendor. Data is integral to both print and electronic communications – broadening your business opportunities. Few, if any, of your competitors will offer data solutions because the vast majority of them can’t. 

When you’re ready to start talking data, give us a call…we’re your data experts.

www.printshopmarketing.com

www.ez-vdp.com

Talking Data

Stop Stupid Marketing

Stupid Marketing: The process of trying to attract business while accomplishing just the opposite.

You'd be amazed how many print shop owners are quite good at stupid marketing. They aren't actually stupid but they aren't professional marketers, either. Stupid marketing mistakes are often obvious and can be disastrous.

One classic example of stupid marketing is: 

A print shop owner looking to expand his business finishes some lessons and decides to identify himself as a marketing services provider. As a good marketer, he knows he must let all of his customers know about his new services. He designs a very clever direct mail postcard campaign and adds some personalization to impress his audience. 

The campaign is hugely successful as evidenced by the print shop’s website experiencing a 45% increase in traffic immediately after the postcards are delivered. However, no phone calls, emails or any other communications are forthcoming. In fact, business overall seems to turn down rather than up! 

What’s the problem? Stupid marketing, of course!

As happens too often, the print shop owner failed to stand back and look at the image he was projecting to the marketplace. What’s that?

The owner did a great job announcing his new services and pushing his customers to his website…but, his old, ugly website delivered a totally different message to his customers:

• He does/did a lousy job of marketing himself
• He doesn’t keep his own marketing up-to-date
• He’s not particularly good with details
• He doesn’t have much sensitivity to image or brand
• If he’s this sloppy in his marketing, what else suffers?

Ouch! If you think the “stupid marketing” label is too harsh, consider this: the printer spent time and money to deliver a very negative message about his capability, image and brand to a large portion of his customer base. More to the point...he paid to drive away his existing customers! What do you call that?

We make this point intentionally edgy because we continue to see print shop owners doing this. But, now the good news!

We also see many other businesses doing exactly the same thing.

If your print shop does website design, you may have just learned a new trick for identifying and selling website opportunities.

USPS = VDP

Maybe you missed the memo. Just in case, we’ll give you the message again:

"You can’t do variable data printing (VDP) unless you do mailing in-house! No mailing…no VDP!"

It should be obvious. Let’s say you use VDP to print a thousand postcards personalized with the recipients’ first names and the data and the amount of their last donation to the charity sending the postcards. How do you now put mailing addresses on those postcards after you’ve printed them? Send the postcards and the mailing list to the mail house and have them do it? Wrong! You don’t have a way to match each personalized postcard to right correct mailing address. It’s impossible to apply addresses to personalized pieces after they’ve been printed unless it’s done manually. 

When you use VDP to personalize printed pieces, the mailing addresses must be included on the pieces at the time the print files are created. In this way, the personalized pieces come out with the mailing addresses already on them. There’s no way to make a mistake addressing and no need to have the pieces addressed later. However, you end up with postcards ready to be mailed. What do you do?

Why not just mail them?

If the postcards have a mailing permit indicated on them, it’s near certainty someone has created a set of documentation for presentation at the Post Office to mail the postcards. All you need to do is to put the pieces in the proper mailing containers – available free at your local USPS location.

The bottom line…there’s no point in even considering doing variable data printing until you’ve figured out how to do VDP addressing and in-house mailing. Personalized pieces have to be accurately delivered to recipients and this is nearly always done via direct mail. The few cases of VDP that don’t require mailing are limited to things such as sequentially numbered forms, event tickets or giveaway pieces with tracking numbers or URLs.

When you're ready to do your in-house mailing and move on to VDP...give us a call. We're the experts at helping digital print shops grow.

Dirty Little Secrets about Variable Data Printing

Secret #1 – 120 Billion

More than 120,000,000,000 pieces are printed in the U.S. each year using VDP. That’s about 400 pieces for every man, woman and child every year! What percentage of those do you produce?

Secret #2 - Software

Variable data printing requires a dozen pieces of software, or more. How many of these do you have and how many can you use?

Most VDP programs are add-on modules to graphics software such as Adobe Creative Suite. Several additional modules for special effects and imposing may also be required.

Fixing up data to for use in VDP may require six, eight or more pieces of software to:

• Open and convert
• Cleanse and de-dupe
• Format and test
• Correct upper/lower case, abbreviations, suffixes, prefixes, etc.
• Sort and analyze
• Enhance

Finally, address list presorting, NCOA, CASS, etc. requires at least one or two pieces of software.

Secret #3 - Presorting

The annual renewal for address list presorting and processing software can cost $3,000 or more. That requires a lot of mailing work to justify the cost when you include the cost of the time spent learning and using the software.

EDDM has reduced the amount of presorted direct mail work in many areas.

Secret #4 – Crossing Over

VDP isn’t just for printing or making fancy images…it’s a crossover technology between print and electronic media. The same data-driven processes used to create VDP print files can also create electronic documents such as personalized PDFs for emailing (also personalized). Moreover, VDP can be used to add security elements to printed or electronic documents, tickets and events.

Secret #5 - Easy

Any digital print shop can easily be in the VDP business without buying or learning any software. Outsourcing mailing list processing eliminates the annual renewal expense. Similarly, the creation of printer-ready VDP print files can be outsourced…leaving the print shop owner with nothing to do but print and deliver VDP jobs.

See how you can easily include new high-value products and services into your business…

www.ez-vdp.com or www.printshopmarketing.com