A client of mine sent me this funny example of personalization gone wrong. It came from his graphic designer, who had received a very personalized offer — her name emblazoned across the front of a variety of pieces of apparel.

Fun apparel JUST FOR YOU!

Featuring the name JAUTELIER!

Order early for Father’s Day!

The card showed a variety of style of outerwear emblazoned with the designer’s name, including one with a very cool graffiti design that read, “It’s a JAUTELIER thing!”

Cool design. Cool idea. Problem is, her last name is Gautelieri.

When personalizing a marketing piece, it’s always important to get the spelling of the recipient right. But in this case . . . that just hurts!

I am (barely) a Millennial. Born in 1980, I rest on the cusp of what Time magazine recently profiled as the “Me Me Me” generation and described on the cover as “lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.”

Guess which magazine isn’t getting a Christmas card from me this year.

Overall, the article has received a great deal of exposure and backlash because of the attention-grabbing, slightly hyperbolic title and the overarching assumptions that Millennials crave less responsibility, still live at home and are obsessed with themselves. I’ve read many opinions on this feature that debate the statistics and accusations the article boasts, but the core of what separates the “Millennials” from prior generations is the advancement of technology during their (our) lifetimes.

AdAge makes a troubling assertion (for direct marketers, at least) that “Among other things, baby-boomer marketers need to accept the fact that Millennials have not inherited their parents’ love for the “touch” of paper.” There is some truth to this statement, but as a Millennial that checks his mailbox every day, there is also a major balancing act that every marketer must accept in marketing to Millennials – the same tricks don’t work anymore, they just work in different ways.

Millennials may not “crave” the touch of the physical printed piece, but still will interact with it given the right pairing with technology. Whether this comes in the form of augmented reality, near-field chips or smartphone-based apps and QR code scanning, ways that allow this connected generation to interact with their mail and magazines using a smartphone or tablet will be key in keeping direct mail relevant to this generation. For example, I LOVE to get coupons in the mail, but I’d like it even more if I could scan and save them to my iPhone. The ideals demonstrated by Google Glass also give insight to how this generation will consume information in the years to come. Whereas the newspaper or Yellow Pages may be less relevant to a younger generation, the information contained within will not be.

The past ten years have spawned the buzzword “multichannel”’ marketing, but Millennials are leaps and bounds ahead of the curve. They were raised on multichannel marketing. Television based off of their video games; magazines that point to websites; College acceptance letters that point to social media sites. This technology has never been new to them, so it has become an expectation in the way they do business and the way marketers HAVE to market to them. So there’s another way Millennials are here to save us, they will push companies to try harder and smarter and the best, data-driven messaging will rise to the top.

Marketers are taxed with using all of the data at their hands, especially from “Big Data” via social interactions and from employing advanced segmentation techniques in marketing to Millennials. Without these methodologies, messaging will be ignored, as it competes with the constant stream of stimuli coming from smartphones, emails, social networks, television, postal mail, video games and soon with augmented reality and wearable computing.

It’s Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend, so it’s time for some levity. Once again, my husband and his much-targeted facilities budget is to thank for this one.

You don’t see hand-addressed business letters much anymore, so this was something that stood out. But since it was a business letter, not a personal letter (like the hand addressing used in nonprofit solicitations), that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

The company strove for the personal touch with the hand addressing, but the message inside left much to be desired. Home-grown printing in toner-saving mode, the name of the company emblazoned across the top but the marketing copy promoting a different product entirely, pricing of “$1.69 each!” but for what? The sticky note covered most of the clear lightbulb printed on the white background the pricing applied to.

Then there was the question of the personal touch itself. The letter was hand-addressed and the sticky note hand-written, but why wasn’t the recipient’s name included? If the salesman wanted to use the folksy, personal approach, mightn’t he have written, “Stewart, do you still have T12 light bulbs?” But the personalization obviously didn’t go that far.

Nice glossy business cards, though. Two of them inside, in fact. So how does that match up with the in-office toner-saving mode for the flyer?

Sometimes marketing is just a train wreck, and you’ve got to wonder, where was the fail? Was it a company that had been approached by qualified print service providers and rejected their help? Thought they could renegade it on their own? Did this one get missed by the sales forces of the MSPs in the local area? How about the printer that produced those nice, high-gloss business cards? Are they promoting ancillary services to their business card customers? If so, was this company made aware of them?

So many questions when you see something like this. The moral of the story is, there are still lots of marketers out there who need your help! (And not just for the printing!)

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?

I often see online discussions about the virtues of hand addressing over using traditional addressing, and when this happens, my thought is, “Well, of course!” Hand addressing stands out from the same old, same old addressing you see in the mailbox every day.

But then, so does a handwriting font. You may not mistake it for real handwriting, but it’s still different enough to grab someone’s attention. Even if the recipient’s response is, “Oh, look! Another handwriting font trying to fool me into thinking this is real handwriting,” it still gets them to look for that extra second or half-second that can make the difference.

So when I see these discussions, I remain mystified by the fact that the discussion always seems to revolve around the same old thing. To me, the more relevant question is, has anyone bothered to do a split test to see whether there is a difference between true handwriting and handwriting fonts?  Is anyone asking that question?

Has anyone out there done a split test on real handwriting vs. handwriting fonts? What was the result?

I just flipped through today’s stack of mail on the counter. There was a lot of it — flip, flip, flip — but only one envelope caught my eye. That is because it was addressed to me . . . twice.

Heidi Tolliver-Nigro

Heidi Tolliver-Walker

It was from an industry name I recognized, so I opened it. It was an invitation to attend a data analysis seminar.

I wondered if the company putting on the seminar had cleansed its data recently. I haven’t been Heidi Tolliver-Nigro in nearly two years. One would think that the double name would have been flagged and cleansed at some point. Not to mention that I now much prefer my married name over my former married name. So much for the “personal” part of the data.

It’s just a somewhat humorous reminder that, in this industry, it’s important to walk the walk and do it well. I’m quite sure that this company knows what it is doing, that the seminar will be professional and useful, and this was just an oversight. But when the competition is nipping at your heels and data management is becoming less of a differentiator than it used to be, you don’t want to be making oversights like this.

When was the last time you cleansed your customer, prospect, and contact database?

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?

When we think about personalized printing and creating relevance-based campaigns, we think about demographic data, purchase history, personalized URLs . . . but how often do we really think about timing?

My husband came in the other day holding a beautiful, glossy postcard selling surface overlay installation. As the director of facilities for a large private school, this was something he would definitely be interested in.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he asked, handing me the card.

I looked it over.

The time of year appeared to be correct:

Tis the seaons for slips and falls. Get free ice melter and help reduce slippery conditions.

That’s true. Ice melt does help with that.

The company had gotten his name spelled correctly. It had spelled the name of the school correctly. As as the direct of facilities, he was the right person to send it to.  But he was right. Something didn’t add up.

“It’s a little late in the year to use ice melt as an incentive?”

Bingo! Facilities directors normally order ice melt in bulk in the fall — September or October. By February, the incentive is competely irrelevant to someone in his position.

This drives home the point that when it comes to 1:1 printing and relevance-based marketing, we have to think beyond the data. What is really of value to the person receiving the mailing? And does the offer have relevance and value not only to the person, but at the time the person is receiving it?

I wonder what the response rate was to this mailing? If it wasn’t great, I wonder if the company has yet figured out why?

At a Canon Oce webinar on January 23, InfoTrends Group Director Barbara Pellow presented “2013 Top 10 Trends for the Printing Industry.”

1. Digital Color is King. All bets are on digital color printing. InfoTrends research forecasts an increase from $29.6 to $39.5 billion in the retail value of  U.S. digital color from 2011 through 2016.

2. Digital Wide Format Goes Mainstream. Digital wide format printing evolves into an key component of companies’ marketing strategies, and will continue its 7% CAGR from 2011 through 2016.

3. Inkjet Accelerates Migration from Offset to Digital. New inkjet solutions offer greater speed, quality, substrate flexibility, and finishing –  as well as more  competitive pricing. Major inkjet growth expected from books, direct mail, transpromo and brochure printing.

4. Enhanced Substrates Drive Digital. Digital presses support new, high margin substrates: rugged synthetics; pressure sensitive stocks; specialty media; pre-scored, ready-to-print dimensional stock; new photobook media, and others.

5. Web-to-Print Manages Marketing Supply Chains. Companies spend billions for producing, shipping, storing, and handling literature. PSPs will optimize the marketing supply chain  – offering online print-on-demand collateral catalogues.

6. Content Reigns. Fifty-four percent of B2B firms increase spending on content marketing. PSP’s cultivate “thought leadership” offering content that educates, entertains and motivates.

7. Hyper-Personalization Drives Digital Print. 2013 is the “Year of Hyper-Personalization” – when marketing materials address more relevant, compelling needs of the consumer. Examples: mailers with personalized map directions and printed materials with PURLs linked to pre-approved applications.

8. Trigger-Based Marketing Meets Customer Preferences. Consumers expect real-time, two-way communications, through mobile devices, websites, and social media. PSPs customers will adopt marketing automation technology, e.g., from Market Sprocket, Hubspot, Orange Soda and Hootsuite.

9. Mobile Marketing Changes Communications. PSPs add mobile marketing solutions to the portfolio: mobile codes printed on packaging, POS, and brochures;  “opt-in mobile messaging” to mobile devices; Augmented Reality – digital graphics coded onto physical objects – revealing information or entertainment via mobile devices.

10. Direct Mail and Social Media Converge. PSPs support customers with social media marketing tools from Ducky, Hootsuite, SpreadFast, and others. Campaigns integrating direct mail with social media lift responses for both.

I have a new reason to love Instagram . . . it has provided me with my latest example of personalization gone wrong. It’s an image posted by Jim David on his Instagram account.  Clearly, the emails were intended to be personalized but the marketer didn’t have a business name to insert into the name field. So Jim’s email was personalized with the default.

This is another example of how important it is to consider your default settings when you are personalizing anything. When the variable field is empty, what will go in there? How will it read once it does?

This issue is relevant to print, too, not just email. Don’t just include a default — make sure that, when it’s used, it doesn’t undermine your efforts to develop a positive relationship with your customer.

If you haven’t connected with me on Instagram, I invite you to do so, as well.

Property and Casualty (P&C) Insurance carriers are in the business of assessing risk; risk of theft, damage, injury, professional malpractice and catastrophe as well as investment risk. They make their money by laying odds on the likelihood that things will go sideways for their customers and that they will earn enough money by investing the pool of premium dollars to pay out on the bet if things do. Lately it seems that climate change is blowing up all the models for setting the odds of a natural disaster and insurers are dealing with defining and delineating coverage for new threats like cyber-terrorism that have completely changed the game.

The core systems most insurers have in place are woefully inadequate to handle the scope and pace of this new insurance game. In order to keep up, companies have built add-on modules and work-arounds to their core systems, often relying on Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access “Band-Aids” to keep business moving. Many carriers that have upgraded their core systems did it on a “go-forward” basis leaving existing business on the old policy administration or claims system and writing new business on the new platform. At some companies this has happened more than once and there are now several “core” systems in production for different lines of business. All of the Band-Aids, work-arounds and go-forward solutions have left data scattered in multiple repositories just when carriers need data in one place more than ever.

In order to adequately assess risk, insurance carriers need large amounts of policy, claims, fraud and customer demographic data all in one place so that they can use risk modeling and data analytics to determine which types of risk are profitable to insure.  According to Accenture’s  2012 North American Claims Investment Survey, 54% of P&C insurers have core systems that are more than five years old, 66% say their claims systems are not optimized to collect and analyze data and 78% regard their capabilities inadequate to manage new forms and levels of risk, such as those presented by cybercrime, terrorism and increasingly frequent and severe natural catastrophes. So, after years of avoiding the disruption, expense and well – risk of a major core systems upgrade many companies have realized that they just can’t avoid taking the leap. A small study of 37 insurance carriers by Novarica indicated that 25 percent of large P&C insurers and more than 40 percent of midsize carriers were in the middle of converting their policy administration systems or planning to start a conversion at the end of 2011.

Keep in mind that the typical core systems upgrade will take from an incredibly fast eighteen months to a more typical three years plus to complete, depending on the number of undocumented work-arounds that need to be incorporated into the system and the level of data conversion to be completed. This means that a large percentage of the industry is either planning a core system upgrade or in the midst of completing one. And what comes out of these systems you ask? Documents, lots and lots of documents: quotes, policies, premium invoices, notices, claims reports, payments and more.

Opportunities abound for reducing the costs of producing documents in parallel with core systems conversion. Bringing systems together increases the opportunity for postal optimization, targeting analytics and improvements to the design of the documents themselves. The core systems upgrades have a larger implication as well; they enable insurers to develop more segmented and personalized products to appeal to different age, risk, ethnic and geographic groups of consumers. Direct marketing and agency marketing support is becoming more tailored and personalized as well with multi-touch, multi-channel and multi-language campaigns hitting the paper, airwaves and cyberspace simultaneously.

P&C Insurers are expected to spend an average of 17.5 million on Claims System upgrades alone. This seems like a pretty substantial number until you consider that the top 16 P&C insurers spend an average of $315 million on advertising each. GEICO alone spent over $993 million on advertising in 2011. This is not counting direct marketing spend – P&C Affinity Mail alone exceeded 500 million mailings in 2011 according to Mintel Comperemedia.

Savvy service providers are positioning themselves to help insures take advantage of newly upgraded systems and a wealth of new data to improve their customer experience throughout the insurance lifecycle. With their plates full to overflowing with core systems conversion initiatives, insurers need help to ensure that the tangible representation of their value to consumers – namely insurance documents – are not put at risk by the very projects intended to reduce risk. Now is the time to show insurers how to redirect some of those advertising dollars toward investments in customer experience and cross-sell using low-risk, high-reward solutions like direct mail, statement marketing and personalized collateral in tandem with QR codes and other calls to action that drive social media engagement and leverage consumers interest in mobile insurance applications. If your company isn’t positioned to help them, maybe you should be looking at some core systems upgrades too.

Elizabeth Gooding is the President of Gooding Communications Group and the Editor of InsightForums.com. She covers business communications trends in highly regulated industries such as insurance, financial services, healthcare and telecommunications.

A study by JWT reinforces what we are hearing on a regular basis now . . . people think the fact that marketers can get a 360-degree view of their behavior and use that information to target them is creepy.  But hey, if it benefits them, who cares?

Here’s the “anxious factor” in play:

Percentage of American and British adults who agree with the following after learning that, through data analysis, companies can predict what they’ll want or need and create customized offers for them as individuals:

• It feels like Big Brother is watching me  (65%)
• The idea of being tracked and analyzed makes me nervous (64%)
• It makes me feel violated (51%)
• I think this will help simplify my life (48%)

As we might expect, Millennials (18-34 year olds) are less likely to feel this way than Gen-Xers and Boomers, but the percentages were fairly tight. But in the end, self-interest wins out. These same respondents also said:

• It’s okay with me as long as I save money  (64%)
• It’s okay with me as long as I get relevant offers  (62%)
• It’s okay with me as long as it makes shopping easier (56%)

It’s interesting that the percentages saying “It’s okay with me if . . .” are nearly identical to those saying, “It creeps me out.”

The takeaway? People will accept being uncomfortable as long as it saves them time or benefits their wallets.

It reminds me of a survey I read just recently about coupons and how people will drive very much out of their way (up to 20 miles, if I remember correctly) to use a coupon worth just a few dollars. I thought that was interesting considering that, with the price of today’s gas, it could end up costing these people money to use the coupon, but apparently the lure of “saving money” was stronger than logic and reason. Consumers are not always rational creatures, are they?

Do personalized recommendations really work? If so, just how much? Most of the data comes from the world of online retailing where it’s easier to track than print, but there are certainly applications to print we can learn from. Yesterday, I ran across an actual A/B split test that provided the kind of detail you don’t normally see.

The test [PDF download] came from Nova Pontocom, the second largest Latin American online retailer. It ran an experiment for one month involving three portals, nearly 600,000 different users, and 50 million page views and resulted in 1 million online orders generating revenues of $230 million.

[NOTE: I am getting feedback that the PDF download link is not working, but when I paste it into my browser, it works fine. URL is wanlab.poly.edu/recsys12/recsys/p277.pdf.]

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest scale controlled experiment aiming to assess the business value impact of personalized recommendations published so far,” write the authors of the report.

Users were randomly assigned to a treatment group that received personalized recommendations and a control group that did not. The personalized recommendations were generated by seven different collaborative filtering techniques based on product views, purchases, and shopping cart composition.

At the end of the month-long test, researchers found (with 95% of statistical significance) that the personalized recommendations resulted in an overall increase in revenues in the order of 8-20%.

Although online shopping and print marketing are different animals, the concept of providing a relevant offer based on the recipient’s own behavior has universal application. For those who’ve wondered just how much personalization can affect the bottom line when all other factors remain the same, this is some pretty strong data.

I read an interesting write-up from MediaPost entitled “Targeted Serendipity: Thinking Harder About Relevance.” It makes an interesting point. What happens when relevance becomes so narrow that it stops taking advantage of customers’ desire for discovery?

For example, just because someone has taken a vacation to France every year for the past 10 years doesn’t mean they never want to go anywhere else. In fact, maybe this is the year they’ve gotten their fill of French culture, the French countryside, and French food and would welcome a related (or even totally unrelated) suggestion.

By over-targeting, the article suggests, we can actually limit sales opportunities by forcing our audience into an overly narrow profile or assumed set of behaviors.

It’s an interesting conundrum for marketers and PSPs offering 1:1 printing. People like relevant information. But they like serendipity and the process of discovery, too. The question is how to create effective print and electronic media communications that take advantage of both?

According to a new report from Smithers Pira, “The Future of Variable Data Printing to 2017,” we finally can put some numbers on the overall growth opportunity for variable data printing. These are not hard numbers since Pira does not track the difference between variable and static clicks, but they are “max ceiling” numbers based on total 100% digital + digital preprint/overprint numbers.

Smithers Pira projects the global variable data printing (VDP) market opportunity (not including catalogs and packaging) to be 656,756 million sheets in 2012 or 28% of total output in the areas under review. It forecasts VDP market opportunity to be 853,097 million sheets in 2017 or 34% of total output in the areas under review.

What’s particularly interesting about these numbers is that globally, Pira forecasts traditional print/preprint output to fall by 0.5% CAGR between 2012–17. This tells us that the opportunity for VDP is coming from the overall cannibalization of digital from offset.

Pira forecasts electrophotography, for example, to grow by 1.5% CAGR and inkjet to grow at CAGR of 14.2% on a global basis.  Likewise, 100% digital output is forecast to almost double from 8.2% market share to 14.2%.

In a global print market that is essentially showing stasis or declines in output volumes, these numbers are really striking. We’ve known for a long time that digital is cannibalizing offset, but these forecasts give us some idea of how quickly and to what extent.

As digital market share grows, so does the lure of VDP. Not just for personalization in marketing, but also for process improvement, cost reduction, and efficiency. In fact, these are the areas in which Pira found the opportunities for VDP to be the greatest.

Process improvement is not sexy, but volume is volume, and the more printers start thinking of VDP as a process, not just a marketing approach, the more those opportunities will continue to open up. Plus, process improvement is an easier sell!