When it comes to marketing blogs, there is always a flavor de jour. Currently, it’s big data. If not “big data,” then at least more data. So it was interesting when Thorin McGee, editor of Target Marketing, asked the question, “Can you ever have too much data?”

The question was asked on a LinkedIn board, along with an online poll, and the responses so far are limited and not yet useful, but there were two comments to the post that are worth thinking about.

The line is to stop collecting data, when the cost of collecting it exceeds your ability to use it to improve your profitability. — David Himes (Direct Commerce Advisors)

You can never have enough of the “right” data. Data that is collected should provide insights and [be] collected for the purpose of answering questions that are important for the future health, development and achieving the marketing objectives of the business. Too much data is collected because it can be collected and not because it is useful or needed. And, often or not, not understood or acted upon in any case! — Rob Wilcox (WebMedia Inbound Marketing)

Print businesses are frequently talking about helping their customers collect data, but what kind of data? You append your database and set up PURL surveys to collect all sorts of information, but is that data actually going to help your customers market better? What questions are being asekd to determine which data is the right data to improve marketing results? After all, you can personalize something without making it relevant.

How do you know what questions to ask to make sure you’re gathering the right data to help your customers?

In the world of personalization, we rely on data on individual recipients to target and personalize content to be relevant and meaningful to them. But in the world of B2B, decision-making has been more collaborative. In fact, according to IDC, the number of stakeholders for each purchase decision has grown by 40% — from five in 2010 to seven in 2012.

Tom Pisello, also known as “the ROI guy,” has written two very interesting blog posts on this topic from the sales perspective that are worth the read (“More Stakeholders = More Sales & Marketing Complexity in 2013” and “Are Buyer Personas Dead?“).

From a digital printing and personalization perspective, the impact of the expanding number of stakeholders could be significant.

As the number of stakeholders in any B2B decision grows, this will impact the ability of marketers to use personalization to promote their products and services. But for the better or the worse?

On one hand, we could say that it makes personalization to the individual less relevant. Stakeholders can range from IT to product management to finance, all of whom have differing agendas and motivations. Even the best, most sophisticated personalization efforts cannot span them all. The higher the number of stakeholders grows, the more watered down the impact of any individual marketing effort to any individual person on that team becomes.

On the other hand, every project often has one individual champion within the organization who advocates for the decision and propels it forward. We never know which of those 5–7 stakeholders on the team it’s going to be.  Sometimes all it takes is one. The recipient of that 1:1 marketing piece could be the person who makes the difference.

What is your experience? How do you think the expanding number of stakeholders affects personalization in marketing?

Last week, I wrote about how the success of trigger-based email continues to support the value of trigger-based mail. After all, the importance is not in the medium. It’s in the timing and relevance.

Chuck Gehman, vice president of product platforms at Mimeo.com, disagreed. He commented on my post, saying,

It’s a real stretch to suggest that it would be possible to emulate what is going on in the digital world. It is possible that a few years ago, before digital marketing started to “run over” personalized print, this would have been a good idea. Now, though, why on earth would you want to? I mean, I get letters from my Honda dealer telling me my car is about to need a service. My BMW/Mini Cooper dealer, on the other hand, has an email platform. I honestly don’t have a preference as to which one I prefer… but I do know that the Honda dealer is spending way more money, and I believe I’m paying for it, which makes me a little unhappy.

I had to read this twice. Was Chuck really saying trigger-based print is passe? So I asked, and this is what he said.

Yes, unfortunately. The time has past for “that kind” of transactional/transpromo direct mail. In fact, I went to the Honda dealer yesterday– and I brought the letter with me (it’s a black and white letter in an envelope with two coupons at the bottom). I didn’t need it, because its content was all in their computer. The first thing the service adviser said was, “I have a coupon for you.”

One thing I might add is that my car was also telling me I needed service every time I turned it on, and it told me what kind of service it needed with a little code on the display– I looked up the code by typing “Honda Pilot B12″ into Google, and voila, I found out I needed an Oil Change.

So, Heidi, what’s the point?

There may still be room for the “print as a luxury” crowd, where some super-high end transactional/triggered direct mail piece is a good move, but generally, I think it’s a quickly and dramatically shrinking category.

I mean, I love print as much (and probably a lot more) than the next guy, but we can’t keep fooling ourselves. Some applications are just done.

I would agree with Chuck for some target audiences, but not everyone lives in the world that he is describing.

My car doesn’t talk to me. I have a neighbor without Internet access. Both my husband’s parents and mine are highly educated, with disposable incomes, but neither has an iPad or a smartphone. My husband’s parents don’t even watch television.

I have a close friend whose husband runs a research lab at Penn State. They don’t have smartphones, and their computer has so many filters on it I’m surprised email gets through. Another set of close friends is still smartphone-free, as well, despite the fact that she’s a teacher and her husband works in the world of computers.

My husband has a director-level job at a private school, but he doesn’t have a smartphone, receives no marketing email, and only looks at his home email once a week.

I think we forget that there is still a whole world out there that is not plugged into this world of e-everything, and unless we don’t need revenue from their wallets, I think print is still very much worthy of their attention.

Chuck was ready for me. He volleyed back:

That’s a very dramatically shrinking world, though Heidi, you’ve published a lot of the statistics to prove what I’m saying in previous posts you have made here!

[Yes, that's true, I would interject, but I've also posted a lot of data showing the continued effectiveness of direct mail, too.]

People who have Smartphones are the people marketers want to spend money trying to reach… not people who don’t consume any media, which is increasingly the demo for the people you are describing.

Um, I responded, does this mean that people without smartphones don’t spend any money? That’s not the case among non-smartphone owners I know. They just spend money on things other than electronics. (Although one is an avid iPad user.)

The other point is that while as an industry, we’ve been watching with great interest as the percentage of smartphone owners has grown, and there was great excitement when smartphone owners hit 50% if the market. But that still leaves the other 50%. Are we going to say they don’t spend money or consume media?

Then the irony of what I was writing back to Chuck hit me. I added,

By the way, just for fun, it’s worth noting that I’m posting my defense of the legitimacy of trigger-based print from my iPhone while at the gym…

In the final volley in this exchange (until I continued it here), Chuck posted:

Uh oh! That is fun, Heidi! Hey, check out the statistics embedded in this post I just stumbled upon.

Okay, Chuck. Good stuff. But growth in one medium doesn’t mean a corresponding decline in the effectiveness in the other. When did media become mutually exclusive? I thought multi-channel marketing meant multiple channels, including a mix of media.  That means that print stays relevant, even when other channels are growing in popularity.

In fact, according to last year’s USPS Household Survey, eight out of 10 U.S. households still scan or read advertising mail that comes to their homes. That sure beats average click rates. And the percentage of U.S. households that “usually read” advertising mail increases as the volume of mail they receive decreases. This is more evidence that, as U.S. mail volumes decline, advertising mail becomes that much more effective. Plus, we know that personalization increases effectiveness even further.

So I agree with Chuck’s comments, but only on a non-exclusive basis. I think that’s where we can easily become myopic. Growth in one medium doesn’t necessarily mean lack of effectiveness of another.

Please chime in . . . what is your response to this exchange?

I’ve been thinking about response rates, and you know what? I’m starting to wonder why we use them. They are in every case study. Every Webinar. Every presentation slide. Yet they don’t really tell us much of anything.

Response rates simply tell us whether the basic marketing elements of the piece are compelling enough to get people to take an initial first step. The respondent makes a phone call. They scan a QR Code. They log into a personalized URL.

If they do, great! But you can have an 80% response rate and the campaign can be a money-loser. Why? Because simply taking the initial action doesn’t necessarily translate into a purchase. If they make the call, scan the code, or log in but don’t actually make a purchase, sign up for the loyalty card, or take the other desired action, the response rate didn’t do you much good at all. That’s why we need to know conversion rates.

At the same time, you can have a high conversion rate but the campaign still loses money. Why? What is the cost to develop and execute the campaign? How much did it generate? If it costs $2.00 each to send the postcard, but each postcard only generated $1.80 in revenue, you’re going to lose money no matter how high your response rate and conversion rates are. That’s why we look at metrics like dollars per sale and ROI.

Here’s a look at some of the common metrics used in evaluating campaign success today:

• Response rate
• Conversation rate
• Cost per sale
• Revenue per sale
• Return on investment
• Lifetime customer value

There are additional metrics for online campaigns, such as open rate, click-through rate, form fill rate, and more.

Do you know which marketing metrics are most effective? Do you talk to your clients about using the right metrics to evaluate the true success of their campaigns? (For info on a brandable white paper on this topic, click here.) If not, this is a conversation you should start having . . . because knowing the response rate isn’t enough.

When we talk about how digital print fits into today’s marketing trends, we often talk about multi-channel marketing. Increasingly, 1:1 printing doesn’t stand alone. It works in concert with other channels like email, social media, QR Codes, social media, and opt-in text messaging.

But just how many channels are we talking about? Is one channel enough? How about two? Or do you need three? It depends, perhaps, on how easy you make it for your customers to deploy them.

MindFire has been tracking growth in the use of multi-channel elements by its customers’ end users (marketers) and its data show just how quickly a marketer’s multi-channel programs can expand when the addition of channels is simplified.

In 2009, Marymount University, which uses the MindFire platform, began using a multi-channel strategy. Over the next two years, it rapidly expanded its number of channels used. Because it tracked and monitored each channel, it knew where its efforts were most effective.

Over time, it increased its total number of mailers by 15.5%, increased its email component to nearly 100%, increased its graphics versioning from one version to six, and added SMS text reminders, personalized QR Codes, and mobile-optimization.

What kind of things did Marymount learn? In its 11 cross-media campaigns with PURLs between February 2011 – April 2012, it found that . . .

• 10% of people responded after the direct mail launch but before the first email
• 69% of people who responded did so only after receiving the first email follow-up
• Multi-channel prospects are 4.5x more responsive than single-channel responders — 1.32% average single single-channel response rate vs. 5.87% average multi-channel response rate.

These are powerful insights.

You don’t get results like these by looking at sales figures at the end of a campaign or end of a season. You get results like these by monitoring each channel individually, then wrapping those lessons around to the next campaign. It’s added time, but as Marymount University clearly discovered, it’s worth it.

As we speak, I am writing up a variable-data adoption report for Pira, a research firm out of the United Kingdom set to release comprehensive global data on 1:1 page volumes from 20011- 2017. The data looks at 1:1 printing from all applications, not just direct mail, and as soon as I can release some highlights, I will. I just love this kind of thing!

As part of that write-up, I’m gathering my thoughts on the current status of marketplace attitudes and remaining challenges. What’s interesting is how they have evolved since the last time I did a brain dump like this.

Years ago, the big limitation, of course, was the adoption of digital presses. You can’t do variable data without a digital press. Then it was the lack of customer databases and the condition of those databases. That challenge still exists, but more companies are working with databases and developing those skills than ever before. Willingness is no longer the problem.

Instead, there are two elephants in the room.

First is data silos.  Marketers are ready and willing to work with databases more than ever before, but the fact that the data is siloed throughout the company is hampering the ability of willingness to become action.

Second is that successful 1:1 personalization is increasingly dependent upon its incorporation into a broader multi-channel strategy. Your success or failure with 1:1 print can depend heavily on other non-print elements, such as email, mobile, and social media. (Hey, no fair!)

After last week’s post about multi-channel marketing, I got a phone call from Joe Manos of MindFire and we had a fascinating discussion on this entire subject.

“Every call, I start talking to customers about the silos,” he commiserated. “From the smallest to the largest in the U.S., they all admit freely that they are struggling with it.”

He talked about speaking before a group of top salesmen for one of the largest CRM software companies about using data to pre-qualify leads and the opportunities offered by closed-contact marketing.

“I was amazed how sophisticated they are—with hundreds of thousands of users across the globe—but also how much they have to learn. Even they are struggling with it,” he said.

What can you do? As multi-channel marketing increasingly becomes the norm, the number of channels and the number of silos is going to become more and more problematic. So get help. Whether that comes in the form of a data partner, equipment or software vendor, consultant, or industry association, reach out. Set in place your strategy for helping clients tear down and integrate those silos while the number of silos is still manageable!

Why do most multichannel marketing campaigns fail? This was a question that was asked at an excellent Webinar (still available here) on analyzing customer behavior sponsored by Adobe Omniture and featuring Philip Graves, author of Consumer.ology.

The answer, noted Raj Sen, group product marketing manager, multi-channel customer analytics for Adobe, is that marketers don’t take into account both online and offline customer behaviors. Therefore their ability to understand and accommodate customer behavior and motivators, as well as analyze their own missteps and disconnects, is severely restricted.

Ah, the carnage left by marketing fragmentation and broken links in the data chain.

It’s not a problem that’s easily solved. Think about all the channels that are being used as part of companies’ marketing strategies. Direct mail, call centers, social media, email, and mobile, retail stores, call centers, SEO. . . Each has its own data silo and contact strategies and too often lessons learned are not shared between them. No channel has a complete view of customer relationship, purchase patterns, and contact history.

Then consider that online media and email are often the funnel through which customers learn about products and services, while conversion often happens offline at a retail store or through a CSR at a call center. When that connection between online and offline is broken (as it often is), companies lose critical insight about customer behavior.

For those of us involved in 1:1 communications, this should send up alarms. How can we create relevant dialog when we only have a sliver of the overall picture? To create truly relevant campaigns, we need to know how people behave and what motivates them from the prospecting stage all the way through conversation. How much effort do we put into finding that out? True customer-centric communications is hard to do when you have few insights into what people do across channels.

Granted, vendor webinars are there to sell the company’s products and services, and Adobe is no exception. Still, the points are valid ones.  We talk about customer-centric marketing, but in order for that to happen, we need to do a better job of monitoring and analyzing customers’ behavior all along the chain.

Yesterday, I wrote about some of the factors that can influence response rate data reported in those channel comparison reports we all enjoy so much. There is another heavily used metric that also needs to be called out once in awhile. That is lift.

Often, you will see results of campaigns referred to in terms of the “lift” over previous campaigns. Often times, that number can be substantial. “So-and-so went from static to 1:1 and got a 18% lift over previous campaigns.” Or “Such-and-such switched to our new marketing platform and saw a 27% lift in return visits.”

These numbers sound impressive, but what do they really mean? Sometimes they mean a lot. Other times, they inflate the perception of the results without meaning much at all.

For example, according to the 2012 DMA Response Rate Report data, marketing campaigns using traditional postcards receive a 3.4% response rate on average. Meanwhile, campaigns using over-sized cards return a 3.95% response rate on average. The difference between the two is 3.95% – 3.4% = .55 percentage points.

But .55 percentage points doesn’t sound very impressiv. However, if we divide 3.4 into 3.95, we get 16%. Now we can report that moving from traditional to oversized postcards creates a 16% lift in response rates. That sounds much better!

In reality, this 16% lift may or may not be a significant difference. How do you know? There is a measure called standard deviation, which is a measure of variation within a sample. If the standard deviation (or amount of variation) is .2%, for example, then .55% is a significant difference. If the standard deviation is .61%, then .55% means nothing at all.

Without knowing the standard deviation, we are left to make guesses and assumptions about how much that lift really means. In the case of the DMA report, we are looking at a very large sample and (hopefully) professional researchers who are filtering the information, creating a certain level of trust. That’s not the case with all data.

So when data is reported in terms of lift, be careful. Look for the raw numbers like true response rates (or other metrics) so you know how big an increase you’re really dealing with. Then you can look at that number in light of other factors, such as sample size, to help you evaluate the value that those lift numbers actually provide.

I’ve been reading about American Printer‘s conversion from a traditional B2B magazine to a B2Me magazine—or a B2B magazine built to order. The new format was launched in April 2012.

Based on information subscribers provide about themselves at the time they sign up, the American Printer B2Me magazines are built on the fly to include only the information of relevance to that subscriber. Content is also driven by where the subscriber lives and works.

Magazines include dynamic QR Codes and personalized URLs that not only provide “traditional” ad tracking (if such a thing can be said), but they also drive content selection. Content that readers ignore will appear less and less often (and, the magazine claims, even disappear over time). Articles and ads with which readers do interact will increase the inclusion of that type of content in the future.

While the marketing messages focus on the reader, what was interesting to me is how this approach becomes the ultimate tool for proving value to advertisers. Kind of “pay per click” for magazine advertising. Not exactly like that, of course, but in a broad sense, I think the analogy is a good one.

When you advertise in a magazine, you are paying for all of the eyeballs that receive the magazine, whether they are interested in your specific category of product or not. So, by creating a profile, not only do readers self-select themselves into the advertiser’s category, but as they scan or don’t scan codes (or respond or don’t respond to personalized URLs), they continue to affirm their content choices and increase their value to the advertiser.

For those QR Code naysayers out there, while it’s true that not everyone is scanning QR Codes these days, I would venture to guess that anyone who signs up for a magazine with content dynamically selected at the time of printing is more likely than average to scan QR Codes.

As I wrote in a Digital Nirvana post last week, the theme that came out loud and clear from the Print Solutions 2012 conference was this Blue Ocean strategy of creating a product that, by virtue of its niche, has a very clear value to its specific and highly targeted audience and through its specificity, has vastly reduced competition.

I would venture to say that American Printer’s B2Me strategy is a Blue Ocean strategy. It will be interesting to see how it fares and the extent to which competitors follow suit.

For the second straight summer, the United States Postal Service is offering a discount to companies that include a mobile barcode on their mailings.

While I believe that last year’s promotion helped to increase awareness of QR Codes in the mainstream, there were also many poor uses of QR Codes by marketers.

To help prevent that from happening this year, the USPS has included additional requirements that must be followed to qualify for the discount.

The QR Code on the mailing must either point to a:

• Mobile-optimized personalized URL and landing pageor…
• Mobile-optimized website where someone can purchase an item

While I do think that those requirements may make it tougher for some companies to utilize this discount, I do think that it presents a great opportunity to service providers to help their clients benefit from the program. Last year, many marketers took the approach of, “Hey! It’s easy and free to create a QR Code. I can put one on my own mailings and save money!” But for many of them, that route ended up in failure — both in terms of ROI and in some cases, perception of their brand.

This year, service providers have the ability to truly offer a full mobile marketing solution that will help their clients achieve business objectives.

Here are a few areas where service providers can really sell their solutions in regards to the USPS promotion:

• QR Code Creation, Management, and Editing: Most free generators do not let users change where the QR Code points to once it’s been created. Service providers can offer that to their clients, which can provide marketers more flexibility than ever before.
• QR Code Tracking and Measurement: Many companies have jumped into the QR Code game without remembering marketing fundamentals. For example, they failed to set it up in a way that they could track whether people were actually scanning the QR Code. Service providers can offer this as a service to help marketers truly measure what channels are working.
• Generating QR Codes for Personalized URLs: Most free QR Code generators do not provide a bulk-upload capability. Thus, service providers can provide the solution to do this for mailing lists that contain personalized URLs.
• Building mobile-optimized landing pages: Marketers are certainly hearing the “mobile is hot” mantra. But many of them need help creating web content that is optimized for the many mobile devices.
• Following Best Practices: This USPS promotion only lasts for two months. But if it’s a success for your clients, then it may certainly create many more opportunities for you to do additional business with them in terms of integrating print, mail, and mobile. Thus, make sure to offer your expert advice throughout the process, to ensure they use QR Codes successfully, in a way that will generate ROI for them.

There are certainly other areas where service providers could offer assistance, including building mobile storefronts. But I think that the ones above are items that nearly all service providers could instantly benefit from and offer, without a tremendous learning curve or investment.

I hope that you find these tips helpful, and I hope that you find ways to capitalize on the 2012 USPS Mobile Barcode Promotion!

I just read a case study that reminds us that soft leads matter, too. In this instance, the case study involved an email campaign, but how often have you heard vendors talk about the value of personalized URLs for capturing “warm” leads? The lessons apply to print, too.

The client was Dollar Thrifty (the chain of Dollar and Thrifty car rental locations) had too much inventory in Florida, so it devised a plan to boost rentals in that geographic area. To do that, it analyzed who had rented from those locations in the past, in which months, and identified people who had shopped rates on the company websites for specific dates but didn’t end up making a reservation.

(Click here to access the case study.)

With this information in hand, Dollar Thrifty created an email campaign offering specials to warm leads with targeted offers. The results were higher open and click-through rates, and ultimately an inventory problem solved.

The ability to capture warm leads is one of the benefits of personalized URLs, but as Dollar Thrifty found, there are other ways, as well. However you do it, the point is to capture them, because they just might come in handy when you need them. And while this case study involved email, there is no reason it can’t work with print.

Just another reason to engage your customers about marketing.

Distributed execution through technology…

With today’s digital and production technology providing endless opportunities for variability and personalization, keeping brand consistency and even regulatory compliance has become a unique challenge.  This is particularly true when your product or service is offered by way of captive or non-captive agents, franchises, dealers and re-sellers. 

These “representatives” want and need corporate marketing support in their efforts to grow their revenue.  Corporate Marketing wants to help reps and needs to contribute to sales growth.

A solution to this growing concern just might be to commission a “Marketing Services Portal” (MSP).  An MSP provides an on-line, self-served, centralized location that reps can access to gain or perform advanced marketing functions in a controlled environment.  Benefits to this marketing platform include:

• Performing multi-channel direct marketing campaigns.  Reps can choose channels, customize a communication based on pre-approved choices and select qualified leads.
• Customized collateral material.  Reps may upload headshots, logos, or maps to be included on co-branded brochures.
• Educational content.  Reps can now have access to unlimited videos, presentations, sell sheets, etc.. 

At the same time, corporate Marketing departments now have the ability to:

• Design effective multi-channel marketing campaigns.  Design templates to ensure control over regulatory statements, brand images and text while also providing modeled, targeted data selection criteria.
• Design effective co-branded advertising material.  Build a template using your existing collateral material, but allow rep customization for co-branding or other variability.
• Organize and push information.  When designed correctly, the portal is an internal marketing avenue as much as it is a self serve tool for the reps.  The platform offers a centralized home to communicate to your reps regularly.
• Be more productive while managing costs.  Instead of spending time re-inventing the wheel for each rep, focus your time on producing creative solutions and programs that can be rolled out en-mass.

Portals sound great, so how do I go about building one?

It is critical to choose the right partner to build your Marketing Services Portal.  Almost all DM Agencies will offer this type of portal or something similar, but not all agencies have the complete service offerings (design, data, delivery) to produce and support the portal  in-house.

While supporting all aspects of the portal in-house is not a pre-requisite to success, choosing a provider who does will cut down on complexity, build time, and eliminate unnecessary risks with partner integration.

In the current business environment, doing less with more is proving to be more important than ever before.  Selecting and implementing the right tools, making best use of the limited resources available, and staying ahead of the competitive curve will define our successes.

To learn more about marketing services portals, please visit Sourcelink. You can also check out Sourcelink’s blog.

No matter how you dress it up, a printer is a printer. Most printers would say that it is their price and customer service that will set them apart. If everyone has the same recipe for setting themselves apart, how much difference is there?

Becoming a marketing services provider takes some time, and there are some non-negotiable steps along the way to make the transformation complete. First, it is necessary for the online presence of the printer to be inviting, friendly, easy to use, interactive, and functional. The ability for your customers to order online is an important facet of the printer’s transformation. Customers should be able to upload mailing lists using the printer as an email service provider. They should also be able to access and download information to be distributed or printed in small quantities.

But having an online store does not automatically make you a marketing services provider. The printer has to examine cross-media marketing. As I state in the book, cross-media marketing is, “a form of cross-promotion in which promotional companies commit to surpassing the traditional advertisements and decide to include extra appeals for their offered products. The material can be communicated by any type of mass media such as e-mails, letters, web pages, or other recruiting sources.”

So you have become cross-promotional and web-friendly. Now you need to execute some campaigns. You are looking to drive traffic to a retail store, whether that store is brick and mortar or digital, and increase sales. There are steps that can be taken to ensure a successful campaign. Create postcards with personalized URL’s or QR codes to attract the attention of potential customers. 80% of all printed material ends up in the mail, and who knows how much of that immediately ends up in the trash. So personalizing gives your efforts a much higher chance to be received than a standardized mailer. Once the recipient accesses the URL, have them confirm some information to expand and provide accuracy to your database. Then drive them to either take a survey or claim their special offer that you advertised on the mailer. After a couple weeks, follow up with non-responders. When customers do come into the store in response to a direct marketing campaign, track that information to measure the effectiveness. If it’s not effective, go back to the drawing board. This should hopefully all lead to increased profits, data on marketing campaign strategies, and customer contact information. All of this lends itself to one of the most important ideas in marketing: return on investment (ROI).

Data is everything. Make sure you aggregate a solid database to help you in your marketing efforts. The best database is one you create yourself. The most relevant information to your business is only known by your business. A list provider can only be so specific to your target audience.

One more big aspect of this chapter is about making print interactive. I mentioned QR codes earlier; they are the best way to integrate new media into your printed efforts. They are two-dimensional barcodes that can be scanned by a smartphone, such as an iPhone or Android. Once scanned, they bring the user to a mobile website or landing page, creating an interactive experience for the customer. This mobile page will be stored in the phone for additional access later on, which means the proper information that you want read will be in the palm of the target audience’s hand.

The groundwork is being laid for the printer to become a full-fledged marketing services provider. In the next installment, we will talk about getting down to fundamentals to really complete the transformation.

To learn more about my book, “Business Transformation: A New Path to Profit for the Printing Industry”, visit my book’s website.

For operations executives and marketers alike, the number one challenge in today’s market is reaching the customer. Customers are clearly in control of the media that they consume. Mobile devices, iPods, DVRs, and the Internet have changed marketing forever. Marketing executives of the future will need to leverage every customer touch point with a mix of interconnected channels. One thing is certain — the effective use of cross-media communications will bring better business results. Delivering multiple impressions and giving prospects a variety of ways to respond can have a dramatic impact.

Media Dynamics are Changing

Over the past several years, we have heard about the importance of transforming into a “marketing service provider” with a focus on one-to-one communications and variable data. Today’s media dynamics are changing. As we look to the future, there will be three critical components for success in the much larger cross-media opportunity:

• Data-driven personal messaging
• Delivering messages across all channels
• Campaigns that engage the end customer

We’ll take a look at the first component now…

Data-Driven Personal Messaging

Marketers continue to see the value in developing intimate and direct communication with consumers. Not so long ago, families gathered around the television set. Now, individuals surf the Web and watch videos on personal, handheld devices. Consumers have grown comfortable with — and have even come to expect — a one-on-one dialogue with marketers. Personalized marketing messages are essential to attracting customers’ attention and delivering communications that increase sales. Today’s consumers don’t have the time or the patience to deal with irrelevant information. Data-driven personalized messaging has never been more important.

Organizations that sell products or services (business-to-business or business-to-consumer) must gather and use information about their customers’ purchases, including how much they spend per sale and when or how often they buy. Knowledge about past behaviors is a valuable tool for predicting future purchases. In addition to guiding business decisions, this information is critical for creating personalized marketing messages that increase sales.

Marketers must work with customers to personalize offers based on past purchases and preferences. The marketing must follow the customer (not the other way around), and the offer must be truly customized to the recipient’s specific needs.

In late 2010, InfoTrends published an extensive survey entitled Capturing the Cross-Media Direct Marketing Opportunity. The marketing respondents that participated in this study reported that over 60% of their campaigns leveraged personalized (one-to-one) or segmented (one-to-few) marketing.

From the perspective of the print service provider, personalization is the future of marketing communications. Service providers must clearly understand how to work with clients on data-driven campaigns. The problem is that personalization is not enough to remain competitive in today’s complex cross-media world.

If you want to learn about the remaining two components, visit www.OceWow.com and download the June 2011 Newsletter. You’ll find even more interesting articles there!

While he was tramping around Peru, Peter O’Neill, a web analyst from Australia, dreamed up a blog about achieving excellence in “joined-up” marketing.

Peter concludes that the marketing management tools and web analytics that measure revenue at various online touchpoints don’t reflect the contribution of offline activities like friends’ recommendations, using multiple computers when ordering, in-store purchasing, and so on. Add in such other influences as PR, print advertising, and social media and – clearly – “What drove the sale?” becomes an inscrutable question. At least for now. But maybe not for long.

Undaunted, Peter says “The measure of success of a marketing campaign is quite simply whether the incremental profit generated was greater than the incremental marketing spend (including salary costs for people working on the campaigns) during the defined time period.”

That makes some sense, but it really doesn’t work for direct marketers who have followed Lester Wunderman since 1967, testing, measuring, adjusting, testing, measuring… and so on.

Though they didn’t admit it for years, all this weighing must have made quite an impression on TV, radio, newspaper, billboard, and print advertising folks, because — somewhere on the way to the scales — a strange thing happened. Every channel began to quietly calculate how it, too, could measure.

As extensions of traditional direct marketing, email, p-URLs, landing pages, and all other online media were naturals of course. But the guys with the scales also began to find measurable profits in infomercials, radio, publishing, television, mobile marketing, and even social media.

In fact, even though apologists had let PR and media advertising off the ROI hook for years, the first arrows shot at social media’s launch charged that nobody could measure its results.

So, is it possible to calculate ROI across multiple channels? It is. Increasingly, it is because direct marketing suggests we can.

p.s. The notion that direct mail is the only measurable non-electronic marketing media still makes it stand out in the crowd.