"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.
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.
