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.

Digital Formatting Services

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

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.