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.

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

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.

Kicking the **** Out of Salespeople

Pity the print salesperson…when they regularly get the [insert expletive] kicked out of them by their supposed customers. How anyone can do this on a daily basis is something of a mystery.

Consider this scenario…

Before the salesperson shows up, customers have been all over internet collecting information from and being influenced by online and other print providers. When the print salesperson walks in, the discussion naturally devolves into how the salesperson can beat whatever the online providers offer: options, alternatives, pricing, delivery, free artwork, service 24/7, etc., etc. etc. When telling the customer that the price is higher, the delivery is longer, no one answers at 3AM, no to this and no to that, the salesperson may feel like the Penguin encountering Batman …POW!! ...BOFF!! ...WHACK!! ...BONK!! It’s painful to even imagine this situation.

A sure way for the salesperson to avoid this is type of whoopin’ is to focus on those areas that should be important to customers such as: effectiveness, focus, reach, ROI, etc. Customers won’t find this type information on the internet nor find most competitors ready to discuss such things…vastly reducing the potential for a beat down. If there's no interest in non-price subjects, then there's probably no sale to be had anyway.

The salesperson can test the waters and set a positive tone by opening with a few questions such as:

• Is your mailing list complete or are there contacts not included (because the customer couldn’t combine all his/her lists)? 
• Can we improve the response by segmenting the recipients and messages? 
• How could we increase the value of your message for the recipient? 
• Would there be value in tracking responses by location, gender or some other demographic? 

Cool! Right? However, there’s one huge potential problem with this approach…the salesperson has to be able to provide a solution should the customer answer “Yes” to any of these questions…or suffer some serious customer-driven wrath.

Actually, there is no problem as long as the salesperson has a friend…we’re your friend.

Move Beyond Order Taking

When you go the computer store…yes, to buy a new computer…do you want to be waited on by the clerk who says:

Clerk #1 “Tell me which box of stuff you want me to drag out of the store room”, or

Clerk #2 “Tell me what your needs are and I’ll tell you what might be the best choices”?

Even if you are certain what computer model you want, you might happily engage clerk #2 to affirm your choice and check whether you might have overlooked something.

Your customers would probably rather deal with someone like clerk #2 when it comes to printing as well. They likely have a good idea of what they want. However, they might like affirmation that they are making the best choice for the purpose and the price. It’s not a matter of telling them what to do or how to do it, it’s a matter of building confidence and credibility for you. But how?

When the opportunity permits, why not simply offer some simple education or information about different printing concepts? Your points, of course, will all relate to services you provide. Even if the customer has no immediate need, you have accomplished two things: 1) increased your credibility (and the customer’s confidence) and 2) planted the seeds for future opportunities.

Consider the following educational points: 

• Increasing document security through printing
• Delivering more focused messages
• Expanding address lists
• Using gender or demographic marketing
• Getting more response
• Personalizing a business for customers

The easiest and fastest way to convey the points may be to give the customer a sample of a printed piece that demonstrates your point. Visual aids are always good, and leaving the piece creates a reminder.

Most likely, your competition isn’t talking or can’t talk to your customers about these types of things. This gives you the opportunity to be the de facto expert for your customers…and more like clerk #2. There’s a fair chance your customer may never find the need for any of these techniques. However, when a question about printing comes up, the customer is more likely to count on you for an answer.

Isn’t that the way you want it?

If you need more information on how to be more than an order taker, give us a call. We’re glad to help.

Managing Customer Deliverability Expectations

You have a mailing list in hand that you know or expect to be old. You expect the undeliverable rate will be high. You know your customer will freak out when 20% or more of the pieces are returned. What can you do? Your options include:

• Use Standard Mail (if possible) so no undeliverable pieces are returned and the customer never knows how many pieces aren’t delivered,
• Manually verify all the names and addresses (good luck!), or
• Discuss the likely results with the customer.

We recommend the last option. Getting a big batch of mail pieces returned does have an upside, however you better make sure your customer understands this before it happens.

First, make sure the customer actually wants a targeted mailing list to use in the not-too-distant future. If not, perhaps you want to discuss EDDM or other options. If the goal is to have a targeted mailing list, then a discussion about cleansing the old list is in order.

You can offer to NCOA the old list to pick up address changes back to 48 months rather than the typical 18 months. This gets you a search of all the NCOA records available. It costs more and should improve deliverability by a few percentage points. However, it will not overcome the “exact match” privacy limitations of the NCOA process (see the previous blog Handling Lousy Mailing Lists).

You can discuss non-USPS address validation with your customer. This should identify more bad or changed addresses. However,there is no guarantee this will change the old list from lousy to great, or even good. The issue here is how you determine that the improvement in deliverability is cost effective.

Ultimately, the surest way to fix the old list is to do a mailing and take the hit on the inevitable un-deliverables. However, once this is done and the undeliverable addresses are scrubbed from the old mailing list, you have a much higher quality mailing list. The “new” mailing list will not be perfect but no mailing list is ever perfect. The use and maintenance of a mailing list is the only way to keep deliverable rates high.

You could save some money by mailing “cheap and dirty” piece. The undeliverables will never see it, however the targeted recipients who do receive it may end up with a poor impression of you. The cost savings of this approach may not be worth the long-term results.

A scrubbed mailing list has numerous benefits. First, and foremost, is the knowledge that a high percentage of the mailed pieces will reach the intended audience. Subsequent mailings (in weeks or a few months) might be sent at discounted postage rates with a high degree of confidence of good delivery rates. Alternating First Class and Standard mailings is a way minimize costs  while keeping the mailing list in good shape. With a good mailing list, you can also discuss a number of other options to help increase your customers’ response rates and business such as data enhancement and personalization with variable data printing.

When a customer hands you a lousy mailing list, look it as an opportunity to generate more business for yourself and your customer. The customer looks to you for your expertise in mailing and expects you to work magic. So, work your magic by managing expectations.

Using Rubber Chickens Can Improve Your VDP Jobs



Rubber Chicken



An interesting read on marketing tactics is Jon Spoelstra’s, Marketing Outrageously: How to Increase Your Revenue by Staggering Amounts! Jon details his experiences as a marketer for a variety of professional sports teams and provides plenty of examples of marketing outrageously. In one instance, renewals by season ticketholders for a pro basketball team were lagging. His technique for fixing the problem was to launch rubber chickens at those season ticketholders that were slow to renew.

We’ll explain how you can use the “rubber chicken” concept to jazz up your VDP projects.

Jon bought hundreds of the classic plucked rubber chicken, tied his message to a foot on each one and sent them in large, FedEx tubes normally used for drawings. If nothing else, the shear curiosity factor of receiving a mailing tube was enough to get the package opened…only to reveal a rubber chicken. The tag on the foot warned, “Don’t fowl out!”, and the accompanying material made a compelling offer for the ticketholder to sign up right away. The really creative campaign was a complete success.

Didn’t that cost a lot? Yes. However, Jon is also a fanatic about ROI. The thousands of dollars spent on the rubber chicken campaign paled in comparison to the revenue generated by the ticket sales. Nevertheless, we’ll leave the discussion about ROI for another blog to focus on outrageous marketing and variable data printing.

Another Rubber Chicken

The image on the left is one that we used in some of our own direct mail campaigns. Is it outrageous? Maybe. Provocative? Perhaps. Attention-getting? You bet. Did it get our message get read? Absolutely! In fact, we did an A/B test with the other piece being a dramatic shot of a snowboarder and some impressive “name-in-the-clouds” VDP text effects. You can probably guess how the test turned out. Writing on a woman’s stomach turned out to be our rubber chicken.

If you do go down the path of marketing outrageously, there is the potential for blow back. Our VDP girl campaign earned us an irate phone call from an older gentleman who was highly offended that his name appeared on the young lady’s stomach. He yelled something about it being evil at least five or six times. We apologized profusely and promised never to send him any more pornography (or anything else, for that matter). Besides that one complaint, we received plenty of kudos and inquiries from recipients…many of them from women. It certainly helped that our very creative (but sensible, conservative and female) graphic designer added the woman's perspective to things.

We see lots and lots of VDP jobs and, frankly, the majority of them seem more like rotten eggs rather than rubber chickens. Boring! It appears that many marketers have yet to recognize the creative and attention-getting potential of VDP. So, having firmly planted foot-in-mouth, we put together some suggestions for moving a little closer to the outrageous with VDP:

Ÿ Use a dramatic image that makes the piece stand out from the rest of the mail (a scantily clad woman is not necessary, however recipients are much more likely to be attracted to images of people or familiar objects or locations)

Ÿ Find a clever or unusual away to include the text with (or on) the image

Ÿ Make sure that the personalization stands out (it has less value if it can be easily overlooked or is hard to recognize)

Ÿ Also, make certain that everything looks clean and as natural as possible (it is easy to end up with weird-looking effects that can leave the wrong impression)

Ÿ Personalize with a simple message that compels the recipient to want to know why they got the piece

Ÿ You don’t always have to spell out the purpose or sender on the front of the piece (a bit of mystery can heighten interest to read the message on the back)

Ÿ Consider adding some additional personalization to the message on the back - even something as simple as versioning for gender, age, interest, political issue, etc. that connects with the recipient

Help your customers find their own rubber chicken and they may never think of you again as just a printer. For that matter, create a rubber chicken to launch at your own customers.

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