There is a lot of hype surrounding Personalized URLs these days, but what’s the reality behind the hype? Do these applications deliver on the promise? “Personalized URLs: Beyond the Hype,” the fourth in Heidi Tolliver-Nigro’s Marketer’s Primer Series, addresses this question.

Personalized URL applications have a wide variety of uses, including sales prospecting, customer surveying, event registrations, information dissemination, and obtaining customer and user feedback. But while these applications have generated a lot of success, they have generated a lot of disappointment, too—primarily because of a lack of realistic expectations.

This reports provides a no-nonsense look at the role of personalized URLs and 1:1 printing in increasing the effectiveness of companies’ marketing programs. It looks at key application categories, “best in class” case studies, lessons learned over time, and best practices for optimizing their use.

The report’s author argues that one of the reasons that many personalized URL applications have struggled is that personalized URLs (including PURLs, RURLs, and other -URLs) need to be seen as merely a vehicle for response. These campaigns must adhere to the best practices for all 1:1 (personalized) printing campaigns rather than relying on the personalized URL, itself, as the primary motivator of response.

The report includes analysis of nearly a decade of personalized URL case studies from around the industry, with a list of best practices drawn from common denominators among the most successful programs.  Notable were the use of multiple media to reinforce the message and the utilization of additional elements, such as over-sized postcards or lumpy mail, to drive response—even more than we tend to see in non-personalized URL 1:1 (personalization) programs.

For more information on this and the other Marketer’s Primer Series Reports, visit the Digital Printing Reports website. Other reports in the series include “Digital Printing: Transforming Business and Marketing Models,” “1:1 (Personalized Printing): Boosting Profits Through Relevance,” and “Web-to-Print: Transforming Document Management and Marketing Models.”

Based on a recent press release from the Graphic Arts Show Company, I estimate that the average printing company attending Graph Expo 2008 brought 1.9 people, compared with the 2.3 people they sent last year. (You can read how I arrived at this number here.) The total number of those left at home this year was about 3,000. So who were the 3,000 who didn’t come this year, even though others from their company did?

I don’t know the answer, but here are some possible explanations for who the missing people were:

1. They were top managers who went to Drupa in May/June and figured they wouldn’t see anything new at Graph Expo
2. They were employees who, in previous years, would have gone as a “reward” for a job well done (but with no specific job-related purpose in attending)
3. They were people whose trip was vendor-subsidized in previous years, but who didn’t get that kind of support this year
4. They were people from the finance department whose services were not needed this year because there was no intention of buying anything
5. They were local “tire-kickers” from the Chicago region who usually come to Graph Expo in order to see what is new and because it is convenient to do so, but who decided to pass up the opportunity this year
6. They were employees who would have come again this year if they had not been among the “downsized” in our shrinking industry

There are probably other possibilities I haven’t thought of. It would be interesting to know what really happened, because that might tell us something about where the industry is headed.

Did your company send fewer people this year? Were you perhaps one of those who missed the trip? Who didn’t go, and why not? Please let the rest of us know.

Have you ever noticed how everyone these days is pushing the green angle to their business? There is a reason for it. To some extent, it’s because it’s just the thing to do and it’s an excuse to get another press release out there. But it’s also because there are customers who really do care about their social responsibility. If you can’t hook them on features, benefits, or price, try green! This is yet another angle that might get their attention.

Recently, on The Inspired Economist blog, I wrote:

When I look at my email inbox, it seems that double-digit percentages of incoming emails now have something to do with green. Manufacturers, retailers, service providers — they are all finding green angles to their company announcements. . .

This leads me to wonder—what’s YOUR green twist? Marketing studies repeatedly confirm that consumers are looking to buy from companies that care about the environment. At a corporate or business level, are you looking for ways to let your customers and prospects know about your commitment to green? If not, you should be.

This post was inspired, in part, by the tagline used by St. John Associates in an industry discussion group on LinkedIn.  I was impressed that the company used this platform to promote its commitment to environmental sustainability to anyone reading the posts — and it promoted, not recycled paper and FSI certification (as we see so often), but the company’s accomplishments in wind power and carbon credits. Every time someone opened one of these posts, there it was. Interesting use of real estate! Kudos.

What are YOU doing to position your company for green?

Read the original Inspired Economist post.

Read all of my “Greening Print Marketing” posts.

“In a difficult economy like this marketing budgets are tight. The only projects that get funded are the ones that can prove strong ROI. That’s why you need a way to prove to clients that your solutions will deliver.”

This quote came from a November 18 press release from Caslon & Company promoting a PODi Webinar, “Promoting the Value of Your Solution.” The seminar is designed to promote Caslon & Company’s Value Calculators, a tool for determining ROI projections from 1:1 printing jobs, which I think is a terrific idea.

But the thing that struck me in reading this was the spate of discussions I’ve had recently in which it’s become clear that proving value for a 1:1 printing campaign is the all-important first step, but it’s not enough by itself. Even the most successful 1:1 applications — in which the results are measured and recorded — are often not repeated. This is something that has proven to be extremely frustrating even for the most proactive 1:1 printing / marketing solutions providers.

Recently, I’ve been posting this question in various areas of LinkedIn. Here are some of the interesting and insightful reasons that have been shared with me.

• Clients do not follow up and verify results.

(Which leads to the question: Are printers following up to find out why clients may not be repeating? If it’s a matter of too much time and effort, are these printers letting their customers mistakenly think that repeat applications take the same time commitment as the initial deployment—and if so . . . why?

• Despite the results, the projects just take too long and are too time-consuming. Marketers like the results but just don’t want to put that much work in again.
• The sales cycle is so long that, once a project is completed, the original marketing team or individual at the company who spearheaded the project has moved on and the printer’s salesperson must start from scratch.

And thanks to Peter Wann, industry consultant, for bringing up this very overlooked but critical disconnect in the process:

• Clients may track response rates, but they don’t track conversion rates. If the client isn’t tracking the conversion rate, the results may not be tracking back to the original campaign.

This insight is particularly thought-provoking and may be one of the dark underbellies of the 1:1 (personalized) printing sales process. As with all challenges facing this marketplace, the solutions won’t be simple or easy, but they start with acknowledgement of the problem, followed by frank and open discussion.

Have your insights or experience to share? Comment on this post or log into my profile on LinkedIn and click on the Answers link and share them!

No, this is not a new title from the great Wiley Publishing organization (201 years old and going strong) – not unless they invite me to write it anyway. When Wiley bought IDG books, it acquired one of the modern publishing industry’s greatest success stories. So successful, there was room for a parallel series from MacMillan – The ‘Complete Idiot’s’ guides.

I confess, I’ve bought a few over the years including the very first title ‘DOS for Dummies.’ Yes, Microsoft’s first quick-and-dirty operating system spawned a publishing tsunami; initially covering computer education ‘for the rest of us,’ (i.e. non-geeks), and today with over 1,000 titles in 39 languages creating a global idiocracy exploring almost every niche, nook and cranny of human experience. ‘For Dummies’ in Icelandic is Fynir kjána and in Polish is Dla opomych. I have no idea why I just told you that.

Of course, the publishers are smart enough to know their customers are neither dummies nor idiots. The genre was a stroke of marketing genius, building on over 50 years’ success of Hodder’s ‘Teach Yourself’ books – which continue to be published. But when pesky PCs with partitioned DOS drives started cropping up on desks, ‘teaching yourself’ was not a popular choice. We just wanted the darn computers to work and not crash; we felt intimidated by having the power of ENIAC on our desktops. We personally owned more number-crunching ability than the entire Manhattan Project and were quite prepared to be gently ribbed as ‘dummies’ and ‘idiots’ in order to acquire just enough knowledge.

The rest is publishing history and the ‘easy guide’ genre continues to sell well, defying a move for this kind of information to shift onto the ‘net. Approaching 180 million copies of the ‘Dummies’ titles alone have been sold worldwide.

But the book: ‘Digital Printing for Dummies’ does not appear to exist for commercial print. If it did, what would it say? First, buy your shiny new box? Or first, built your network with W2P? Would it advocate exclusively a TCO (Total Cost of Operation) costing approach so every page turns a profit; or would it say “be a real dummy and follow the offset pricing trends?” Would it say “accurate colour does not matter,” and “the way to win business is to be cheaper than the other guy?” Or would it say that it’s the business you say “no” to in digital that helps your bottom line. Would it position printing as a manufacturing or craft-based business, or advocate a total customer service model? There must be hundreds more.

What do you think?

Heidelberg’s CEO Bernhard Schreier was asked in a recent interview whether Heidelberg had missed an opportunity by exiting the digital-printing market and focusing on offset. He thinks (understandably) that Heidelberg’s choice was correct. About offset, he says: “It offers the best price/performance ratio with respect to quality, productivity, and length of print run. None of that will change, even in the long run.”

I’m not so sure about that. Do you think Heidelberg made the right choice?

The USPS has just announced the loss of some $2.8 billion over the fiscal year that ended on September 30. This loss occurred despite a decline in mail volume of some 9.5 billion pieces and substantial efforts to trim costs and operate more efficiently. To be sure, the spike in fuel costs had an impact, but somehow I don’t think that was the tipping point that led to the loss. What this all but ensures is a possibly significant postage rate increase in 2009.

Depending on its size, this increase could have a profound effect on many mailers –and their customers. A bank mailing out a million statements every month is spending over $350,000 a month on postage, so any CFO worth his country club membership is going to be looking at that as place of potential cost reductions. In fact, many if not most, banks, utilities and credit card companies are already encouraging customers to shift to electronic statements. Some banks are making electronic statements the default choice for new accounts and charging a fee if the new customer wants to get theirs in the mail. While it would be a marketing and public relations disaster to force all customers to shift to electronic delivery, I think institutions are likely to begin charging people who prefer receiving hard copies, especially given the state of banking these days. That’s one approach.

The other is to make a statement more useful as a customer touch-point and increase its relevancy to the customer beyond being merely a bill. The knee-jerk reaction is TransPromo, the idea of putting marketing offers on bills. This seems, at least for now, to work best in relatively limited ways, but give it time. The real estate on a statement, though, is every bit as effective for informing and educating customers about products and services, providing advice and information, announce changes in policies, and generally building relationships. Every organization that sends out bills and statements has plenty of other information to communicate and that monthly envelope that’s sure to be opened is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of reaching every customer. The cost of printing and sending out the statement is still there, but when it does more than just being a transactional document it can be money well spent.

There are a lot of layers to this and there is very definitely no one-size-fits-all solution. How do you see postage costs affecting the transactional market? How do you think statements can be used to be more than just a revenue collection medium? Mailers are all looking for answers, and more than a few of them read this blog. Let’s talk!

On Thursday, November 13, two milestone events took place that will be important for the future of web-to-print systems in Europe.

The first was the declaration by a German patent court that a key Vistaprint patent was invalid. For several years, Vistaprint has been filing lawsuits against European web-to-print providers based on the European patent, and several companies had gotten out of the business or made financial settlements with Vistaprint. But one of them, Unitedprint, decided to fight the suit in patent court, and it has now prevailed. The court ruled the patent invalid because the technology involved had already been in general use when it was granted. This means that a dark cloud hanging over the market has been removed, and companies (both system vendors and printers) will be less hesitant about getting involved with web-to-print systems.

The second event was the acquisition of the web-to-print software developer diron, one of the leaders in the European market, by CeWe Color, Europe’s largest photofinisher. This will give diron access to CeWe Color’s huge financial resources, and it could help diron become a major international player in the web-to-print market.

You can find more details on both news items at www.beyond-print.net.

At Graph Expo the Must See Um panel identified IT Competency as an area service providers must have to survive. Cary Sherburne sat down with Charlie Corr of Mimeo.com to talk about IT Competency with the printing industry.

Printers sticking close to home with print production only should take a clue from AdWeek (11/5). As reported by IAB,

Marketers trying to reach the elusive 25- to 44-year-old Generation X segment, which is at the peak of its buying power, face several key obstacles, including splintered media consumption, a greater diversity in “lifestyles,” more penny-pinching habits than Baby Boomers and an aversion to traditional ads, eMarketer has found. Potential avenues of success include ads on social networks, boosting mobile marketing efforts and making online shopping more user-friendly.

For printers, this means that their customers may be finding traditional print marketing methods to be increasingly ineffective, and if those customers are not tracking their marketing channels, they may or may not know why.

Consequently, if marketers see an overall decline in responsiveness to print, they may assume that this decline is a general decline when, in fact, it may be due declines in certain demographics such as this one.

This potential “generation confusion” should be a great concern to printers. As marketers mix up their channel priorities, printers risk losing print jobs to electronic media when not all of this migration is warranted. In some cases, marketers may be better served by switching to electronic media. In others, it may be counter-productive.

Printers need to make sure they understand the dynamics of generational media. Not only as they continue to tweak their marketing services offerings, but also to protect themselves against unnecessary attrition from print. To do this, they need to understand which demographic segments respond most powerfully to which media. Then, they need to begin (or continue) to position themselves to provide (or protect) offerings that best serve each demographic segment.

Pundits have been saying for quite some time that printers need to better understand their customer’s customer, but now the drivers are changing. It used to be that understanding the end user would help printers sell various print applications. Now it may help them protect themselves from losing them.