For those involved in data-driven printing, other people’s direct mail horror stories can be a great resource for refining your own workflow to make sure the same mistakes don’t happen to you.

Here are three of the latest disaster stories from members of LinkedIn’s Direct Marketing Association (Official) discussion group. You might want to put down your coffee before reading so you don’t burst out into laughter and spit it at the screen.

When I was just starting my DM career, the blank spots for personalization were inside parentheses and usually had copy that said (insert name) as a reference for production purposes. You guessed it! When the material was printed, all the personalization spots were printed exactly as the original boards, i.e. with a salutation that said: “Dear (insert name).” It was just a test, but nonetheless, we printed 50,000 pieces that had to be trashed.

One of my insurance client’s mailings to home/auto policyholders for renewals also included “Dear Deceased.”

We lasered 11,000 (of a 150,000 run) before someone noticed the bottom line of the address read “City, State, ZIP.”

These are a funny read, but I’m sure it wasn’t funny when these things actually happened. The good news for us is that we can learn from someone else’s disaster.

Has your client checked its name field and cleansed it for “deceased”? What proofing processes do you have in place to ensure that variable field markers are not printed as text? It seems impossible until it actually happens to you.

So how about you? Got any of your own disaster stories to share?

For years we’ve been told that it’s smart spending to market to our current customers.  Patricia Seybold, Don Pepper and Martha Rogers have written volumes about how it is good business to keep and grow a customer. As far back as 1996 with One Stop Marketing, Jonathan Trivers concluded that it costs three times more to acquire a new customer than it does to re-attract an existing customer — and it costs 30 times more to acquire a new customer through through advertising than by referral from an existing relationship.  Yet even while pulling out of a recession in 2010, shiny new ad campaigns draw the majority of our budget and our attention.  We don’t work the bench; we spend big bucks to bring in a marquee shortstop. 

According to Trivers, about 95% of marketing dollars are focused on attracting new customers at the bottom of the “loyalty ladder.” I like the image of moving customers up a loyalty ladder.  Customers atop this ladder are so satisfied that they won’t leave you at any price and they are active promoters of your business. Rather than pouring out all the budget at the bottom of the ladder, companies should be spending at least 30% at the top half of the ladder leveraging existing customer communications.  According to J.D. Powers, in the auto insurance industry 56% of highly satisfied customers will recommend your business to a friend; such customers report making 2.5 actual recommendations and 46% of them say they would never leave you. Results are similar across industries.

So in an economic climate that requires smart spending, consider winning by increasing focus on your customer base. Know that this can be a really big win—like a Red Sox win against the Yankees in late September.  Why?  Because the most effective way to market to your base- increasing loyalty and gaining new sales and referrals- is also highly cost-efficient.  You can leverage the transactional documents your company must produce and deliver to customers.  In lean times, more than ever, a TransPromo strategy (yes, it’s that word again) is a home run because the transactional communications budget also supports your marketing program.

Cost-savings score big, but the game-winner is that TransPromo (or as I prefer, Transactional Response Marketing or TRM) can achieve significantly better results than more costly traditional forms of marketing such as direct mail or print/TV/radio advertising. TRM can achieve these powerful results for two reasons.  First, research shows that transactional communications are important to customers so they pay more attention to them – and therefore to the messages you integrate with these communications.  The average person will give a statement nine times more attention than a piece of direct mail.  (Less than half of direct mail is even opened.) Again, according to J D Powers, transaction documents are a key driver of customer satisfaction, comprising 41% of the consumer finance satisfaction score and 17% of the credit card industry satisfaction score. Second, the data that drives transactional communications enables you to integrate specific, personalized, highly relevant messages and offers that are more likely to please customers and/or to get them to take action.

TRM is powering winning marketing teams today.  A March 2008 study by Aberdeen Group showed that among companies meeting best in class standards, those utilizing closed loop marketing exceeded other best in class peers.  The closed loop group achieved on average 6% greater ROMI and 7% more lead conversions. Revenues per account were 3% greater and average return on marketing campaigns was 14% greater. Transactional Response Marketing is closed loop marketing applied to transaction documents. Company success stories include Avis Australia which saw response rates rise from 2.5% to 10% when invoices were utilized to extend offers vs. other approaches such as direct mail or advertising.

So do you make the business case for Transpromo or Transactional Response marketing based on immediate response rate, long-term customer retention and value, or substantial operational efficiencies? Does it taste great or is it less filling? Is TRM as switch hitter? Have I been watching too much baseball? It’s a nice hot Sunday afternoon– I think I’ll go grab a beer and ponder this at length.

Cheers.

“Begin with the end in mind”, a missive popularized by self-improvement guru Stephen Covey, is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation. The idea that our direct marketing is re-created over and over as it is produced certainly applies to variable data marketing. Beginning with – or more aptly, keeping the end in mind, is critical to a successful outcome.

In practice, the best implementation of Covey’s mantra is a system that pushes the restrictions of the implementation forward in the creative and data management processes. For example, if our objective is to produce personalized communications in both electronic and print mediums using a common creative and database, the creative and copywriting activities must be restricted by the concept of the physical page used to deliver the message even though such a restriction does not exist in the electronic medium. Similarly, if we have embedded variable data tags into our copy, the design must account for the reality that data of different character counts will move line breaks and alter paragraph lengths as each record is merged. Accounting for the dynamic behavior of variable data creative and copy either through templates, rules or preflighting (or a combination of these) enables designers and copywriters to envision the implementation of their work as they create rather than looping back to the creative process when the implementation fails in production.

The digital print revolution- and more so the advent of multi-media marketing that combines print, email and push messaging- has changed the way business speaks to its prospects forever.

 That the days of producing 20,000 of the same message, checking addresses for the longest record, sprinkling a few seeds into the list, reviewing one piece for quality and pushing the send button are numbered is a prognostication we’ve all accepted. For over a decade vendors have been extolling the virtues of variable data and one-to-one marketing with demos that often seem as miraculous as a Las Vegas magic show. And yet, the old one-size-fits-all direct marketing lives on in spite of the increasingly obvious shortcomings. The majority of the effort to sell marketers on variable data marketing has been focused on gimmicky creatives that spell a prospect’s name in shells to advertise a beach resort travel package.

 The exercise of bridging the gap between a flashy demo and putting a process in place that gives the marketer confidence that Joe didn’t receive Jane’s creative, or that the VIP pricing wasn’t pushed to the entire list, is rarely discussed.  Such questions as those below are rarely included in demos and many service providers end up wrestling with these as they move from demo to deployment:

1. How should information be gathered and managed?
2. How does a marketer proof variable data marketing?
3. What needs to be done to validate information?

 It’s often at this juncture between the flash and the process that variable data marketing fails or succeeds. Not surprisingly, it’s also where the most innovation is required and the hard work has to be done if variable data marketing is to become a trusted tool for majority of direct marketers.

Last week the Columbia Daily Tribune (Missouri) published an article  about Kelly Press Inc., a 78 year old commercial printing company that recognized that their print business was changing. Kelly Press responded by both investing in updated printing equipment (Kodak Nexpress 2100) and by diversifying well beyond print. It is a great tale that clearly illustrates the message that analysts from InfoTrends and NAPL have been shouting from the rooftops – the need for printers to transform themselves into “Marketing Services Providers.”

Lost in the dialogue about Marketing Services Providers (MSPs) is the transition from general commercial print to specialization, from ad hoc jobs to programs. While Kelly Press is a transformation success story, I wouldn’t call them an MSP- rather they became a specialized publisher, developed focused services for specific verticals (radio stations, college sports, etc.) and even purchased the rights to the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association for a period of time. Their diversification of services and focus on specific verticals has helped to drive print … and more specifically digital print.

I particularly like the final quote in the story. “For a while we’ve recognized that print is dying,” said Colin See. “So to just try to sell more printed stuff wasn’t a good long-term solution. But to try to incorporate print into what the world is becoming makes sense.”

So, when we hear terms like MSP or business communications service providers – let’s keep in mind that often the challenge is simply to move to strategically packaged services as Kelly Press did. In most of these cases, print is a core service and actually enhances the total offering.

This type of transformation story is playing out in many segments of the printing industry. For example, there is a heated discussion about the role of transaction documents incorporating marketing messages and whether this is a threat to direct mailers. The underlying discussion has focused on who has the capabilities to manage data and provide complex services to help address new applications. Managing data is often cited as the key to becoming a Marketing Services Provider. My question to the Digital Nirvana community is this:

Is “Marketing Services Provider” the right term for what today’s printers should aspire to be?

Changes in 2007 to the Australian Superannuation regulation required an update of tax file numbers. Superannuations or Supers are like US IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts)

Up to 31 July 2007, contributions to retirement funds were taxed at the lowest rate. After this date, if a Tax File Number (TFN) was not recorded on the account, contributions would be taxed at the marginal rate of 45% meaning less of each contribution would make it to the customers account : – bad for customer, very bad for ING since they make their money based on funds under management.

ING’s agency convinced them to use the changes that they were going to have to make in response to this legislation to test the impact of color and personalization.

So they redesigned the statement and created a black and white version and a full color version which were similar in layout.

They created a test group and a control group.

The control group was black and white and generic

The test group was both color and included relevant messaging and personalized imagery so you have to look at the results as a combined effect.

The bottom line is that they drove results directly attributable to the test:

An increase in funds under management of 22.5 million included funds rolled over from corporate plans into their super and new contributions to existing supers

They didn’t have staggering results for collecting Tax file numbers: they got about a 1.16 % response with the control group and a 1.79% response with the test group (but that’s still a 54% better response than the control.)

But the numbers your CFO will really care about are the return on each dollar invested: $111 for the test group versus only $58 for the control group.

Print in the Mix is providing access to a PODi case study on the use of personalized direct marketing to Virginia Military Institute’s alumni. The campaign included email, direct mail, Personalized URLs and video and achieved an overall direct marketing response rate of 23%:

The VMI Foundation is a private, non-profit corporation that annually raises millions of dollars in gifts and commitments for the Virginia Military Institute. DENMAR Information Technologies developed a direct marketing campaign that would engage VMI Alumni in a new and relevant manner and gather key information about alumni to be used in future fundraising campaigns. The campaign included email, direct mail, Personalized URLs and video and achieved an overall direct marketing response rate of 23%.

The case study is accessible until April 30, 2010.

Highlights

31,000 subscribers received six 32-page issues (36 pages with Cover)

A 2 week 24×7 production cycle was required for each issue

According to Ace Group’s Val DiGiacinto, Lexus, Time, Inc. and Team One said readership time on Mind Magazine was three times that of a regular magazine.

60% lift rate (based on click-through response to custom landing page)

Last week WhatTheyThink presented a Webinar with MindFireInc titled Does personalization really work? Statistically sound research and live use cases tell the story (Streaming Archive). The Webinar provided an overview of a study conducted by Marnie Brow, Ph.D. on response rates personalized cross-media marketing campaigns.

The study compared response rates of more than 650 real-life personalized cross-media campaigns, with data from DMA and PODi to statistically demonstrate the uplift that can be gained from relevant, personalized communications.

You can download the study free of charge from MindFireInc.

Frank Romano reports from a PIP Printing & Marketing Services event in Manchester, Connecticut. The event revolves around digital printing and variable data and Frank shows us some classic examples of some campaigns over the years.

What are some of our favorite variable print examples from the past?

Have you noticed? The best practices for personalized URLs are becoming more sophisticated. You may not always see those best practices listed, but they are being reflected more and more often in industry case studies. It’s really neat to see the evolution.

It struck me because, earlier this week, I released an update to “Personalized URLs: Beyond the Hype,” a primer and training and educational tool for printers and marketers.  In the best practices section, I had previously separated out the best practices into two categories: those commonly seen in industry case studies and those not yet commonly seen but practiced by some of the industry’s leading practitioners. During the process of updating the report, however, it struck me the extent to which the two are converging. In fact, in the October 2009 update I removed the distinction between the two classifications.
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Since the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 was signed earlier this year by President Obama, credit card issuers appear to have focused on squeezing every last dime from consumers before the changes take effect. According to research from the Pew Charitable Trust, credit card interest rates have spiked by an average of 20% on 91% of credit cards with outstanding balances.

While the CARD Act strengthened reforms already considered by the Federal Reserve under Regulation Z, and accelerated the time for adoption, some in Washington feel that it did not accelerate the timeline enough. Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) who authored the credit card reform bill, and Barney Frank (D-MA), Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, have introduced H.R. 3639, the ‘‘Expedited CARD Reform for Consumers Act of 2009.”  The current legislation calls for some provisions to become effective in February 2010 and others in August 2010. This new legislation would  accelerate the effective date for all of the CARD Act reforms to December 1, 2009. 

 “It’s clear that credit card companies are taking advantage of this period between the signing of my bill and the current effective date,” Rep. Maloney said. “The breadth and depth of the rate hikes happening now point to the need for faster consumer protections. Americans need relief now.” You can read the full text of H.R. 3639 here.

Some industry experts have asserted that advancing the compliance deadlines would be nearly impossible for credit card companies to comply with, given the sweeping changes in systems and products referenced in my previous post Countdown to the CARD Act – Part 2. Others argue that if companies can manage the necessary system changes and mailings to facilitate rate hikes to over 90% of the “card carrying public” in a few months, they can facilitate the changes necessary to change rates less frequently as would be mandated by the CARD Act. 

What do you think?

By Nicholas Barzelay

One of the problems in training for VDP is the issue of not providing an adequate understanding of the fundamental technologies involved. In football for example, a player needs to know how to run, block, and tackle before being able to adequately perform play patterns. In the military there is a step called “basic training”.

In VDP (and I have experienced this) the approach seems to be navigating the graphical user interface and pushing the right buttons in the proper sequence. After a couple of sessions, you are considered “trained”. Just follow the demonstrated sequence of windows and buttons each time, and you will be able to do VDP – at least mail merge.

This provides no preparation on the basic processes. When it comes to the menus, windows, and buttons, there is not an adequate explanation of what is going on under the hood or how it all relates to the basic processes. Finally the graphical user interface becomes the workflow. The workflow is narrowed and necessary activities outside the user interface tend to be ignored. The user interface does not comprehend the full VDP workflow, leaving a disconnected string of dots.

Some time later when the operation is only doing mail merge (something that can be done with most capable word processing applications), the question comes up: “Why can’t we get more out of our digital press?” The answer is that nobody understands VDP basics. The same holds true for DAM, except that the question is: “Why did we pay so much for this software and only use it as a Web portal?” The answer to that question is similar — nobody comprehends its basic functionality either.

The question frequently comes up: “What can I read to understand some basic technologies involved in VDP?” The reading list below can provide a good start, however it is not necessarily going to supplant some good basic training.

Reading List

XML problem-design-solution by Amiano, M., D’Cruz, C., Ethier, K., & Thomas, M.

This book explores the use of XML to produce a range of documents by repurposing content. Discussion starts with simple documents and then progresses into more complex documents.

FileMaker Pro: the missing manual by Coffey, G. & Prosser, S

The manual provides a good reference for learning and then using the FileMaker Pro desktop database. It also provides a hands-on explanation of database basics in the form of tutorial exercises.

A designer’s guide to Adobe InDesign and XML by Maivald, J. & Palmer, C.

This is an excellent hands-on window on variable data publishing. The authors have addressed several kinds of documents in text and in tutorial examples. They take the reader through building each kind of document step by step.

Instant InDesign: designing templates for fast and efficient page layout by Powell, G.

This book is a good companion to Maivald and Palmer (above). It addresses the key corollaries in VDP: document structural standardization and document content variation.

XML all-in-one desk reference for dummies by Wagner, R. & Mansfield, R.

For anyone with a desire or need to learn XML basics, this book provides a simple explanation of key XML technologies using easily understood and consistent examples. The examples can be downloaded for experimentation and learning.

By Nicholas Barzelay

Basic data processing for VDP is concerned with storage and retrieval, manipulating data structures and content, and program logic expressed in an input-process-output paradigm. This requires fundamental programming and data management skills.

Understanding database is helpful for initial data acquisition and front-end data preparation. Basic file manipulation skills – read a file in, test for specific content, modify identified content, and write the file out – are helpful in integrating data into a document design application. Integration activity requires small ad hoc programs run at the terminal without development of graphical interfaces.

Use of XML requires only a basic understanding of the technology. This involves the ability to recognize a document or data file structure, express the structure as a simple DTD (document type definition), and then properly tag the document or data file. While more in-depth understanding of XML useful, it is not a necessity since much of XML data manipulation can be accomplished through simple file processing, rather than XML tools like XSLT or structures like DOM (document object model).

Where basic data processing skills by themselves fall short is in the area of applying them to business problems. Business and system analytical skills are needed as a precursor to satisfactory application programming skills. In other words, programming and data manipulation have to be put into the context of a customer’s business requirements.

Alternatives
One alternative for acquiring usable data processing skills for VDP may be to hire a good systems analyst or business analyst who knows how to program and understands databases. However, for addressing graphic design in a business or systems context, this approach has its limitations. The alternative is to find a good graphic designer with a lot of business and computer programming exposure. This is easier said than done, because such a person may be hard to find.

One reason for this difficulty is that basic mental proclivities for graphic design and programming may be antithetical. It is the difference between artists and engineers – left brain and right brain activities. A related reason is that the curriculum for training graphic artists does not commonly include programming and database, and the usual computer science or information technology curriculum does not include graphic arts. To further complicate matters, such studies not necessarily attempt to provide an understanding of contextual business considerations or print production issues.

There is one certainty: the complexity of technology studied in computer science and information technology programs will likely guarantee that any computer guru worth his or her salt will quickly become bored with VDP – different skills, different interests, different personalities, and different sets of mental processes. The idea of simply finding someone with a computer science degree is not the panacea it might appear to be.

VDP is IT
Based on lab trials and classroom observations, in terms of actually producing a variable document, as much as 60% to 80% of the work has to do with some aspect of data handling and preparation, text processing, and programming. That leaves only 20% to 40% of variable document development work for traditional print activities.

IT activities include a variety of tasks: database management, data file extraction and processing, associated programming, XML conversion and preparation. When considering digital asset management (DAM), other than image and color management concerns, development of metadata, key words, search criteria, and other library-related functions, much of the activity related to image file storage, maintenance, security, and accessibility is also IT related.

In fact, in developing variable documents, the development methodology is closely akin to an IT approach: objectives definition, requirements analysis, high-level design, detail design, development, testing, and implementation. Based on research, the VDP workflow is more like an IT rapid iterative development workflow than a traditional sequential print production workflow.
When Web components such as email, personalized Web pages, and other personalized Internet communications approaches are added, the percentage of IT-related activity increases.
Finally, infrastructure maintenance and operation for DAM and VDP is very systems intensive in terms of both individual system platform operations and in terms of cross-platform and cross-application integration. Deployment and integration of VDP and DAM capabilities primarily represents an IT problem.

Conclusions
Given the heavy amount of IT in VDP and DAM, we can draw a couple of conclusions:

1) In terms of training costs and productivity thresholds, it may be more cost effective to hire people with IT skill sets and then train them in printing and graphic design than to hire print people and train them in IT. (And, by the way, graphic design people may not know any more about the technicalities of printing than IT people.)

2) In terms of academic preparation for digital printing careers, printing, publishing, and graphic design curricula that address digital printing need a heavy concentration in IT on subjects germane to VDP and DAM. Graphic design curricula need to comprehend the nuances of printing, and IT curricula should include VDP and DAM as study topics.

Last time we talked about ways Océ is helping customers build business with inkjet technology and how market acceptance of digital print quality has changed. Today, in the final installment of this interview, Mal Baboyian talks about how Océ is changing the way it presents itself to the market at big venues like PRINT 09 and gives us a glimpse of what the company will have on display in Chicago.

NW: Océ used to show only its high speed production presses at shows like PRINT or Graph Expo, but at recent shows you often have one or two wide format machines on hand. Why the shift?

MB: Océ has one of the broadest product lines in the industry covering the office, wide format, display graphics, and production printing. But even customers in these segments weren’t always aware of our other offerings and capabilities and didn’t necessarily think of Océ when they needed a different type of equipment. Having a wider range of equipment at shows strengthens our brand by showing the full scope of our offerings and helps position Océ as a leader in more segments of the printing market. We also share some technologies across the different divisions of the company and are always looking for ways to leverage what we know. As I mentioned, our inkjet experience in wide format aided us in developing the JetStream family. Many of our customers had no knowledge of Océ’s breadth of solutions in the office, production printing and wide format segments. And many of them have needs in more than one segment .
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