As I regularly share with employees there are two main ways I think about this question. First is being a good corporate citizen and recognize that we have a responsibility to secure the data we are entrusted with to protect the privacy of individuals. According to ITRC more than 35 million data records were compromised in corporate and government data breaches in 2008. Considering that number is 3 years old I’m sure it’s growing so our focus needs to be “do no harm.” Each of us wants those that have our personal data to protect it and we need to give others that same respect. The second consideration is core in building a strong, healthy business in today’s information based world. It’s a matter of “Trust”. We work hard every day to continue to earn our customers’ trust and in this, as well as many industries, our ability to keep our customers’ data secure is one of those “make it or break it” triggers. So it can’t be an annoyance, overhead, or an afterthought…it must be part of the business as much as quality control, hitting mail dates, or even invoicing.

So what’s the point of this blog…it’s important that we all keep the ‘why’ in mind as it’s the ‘why’ that ensures all the procedures, hardware, and people come together to achieve the goal of protecting data.

Special thanks to Sourcelink for this post. Check out their blog here.

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.

By Liz Swanson

There’s no question that today’s consumer is overwhelmed by the amount of marketing messages they encounter. Every day, they come across thousands of emails, direct mail pieces, advertisements, web banners, texts, and so on. They’ve almost become numb to the selling, which means that marketers have to find new and creative ways to break through the white noise.

Unfortunately in the quest to be THE message that is heard on any given day, sometimes a marketer will go a little too far–and enters the dark side of direct mail marketing. The message is heard for all the wrong reasons, leaving the consumer confused, angry or manipulated.

Recently, Boston.com posted an article about a direct mail campaign that went out to an unknown number of National Grid customers from HomeServe USA, an insurance company that sells coverage for furnace and plumbing repairs.

The intention of the mailing was win back former customers and have them reactivate their insurance coverage with HomeServe USA. Instead, many of the recipients thought they had received a bill from National Grid. The direct mail piece contained National Grid’s logo, had a design lay-out similar to a bill with an amount due, and the warning that it was “Payable Upon Receipt.” Not until the fine print on the second page was HomeServe USA referenced.

Just read the comments to the article to get a sense of how duped some customers felt. While it’s true that they had National Grid’s permission to use its logo and name, HomeServe USA should have been more upfront with their audience about the intention of the mailing.

The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office is now investigating the complaints about the mailing, meaning HomeServe USA could be facing criminal charge for deceptive marketing practices.

Yes, consumers should read their mail before blindly sending money to a company. BUT with effective direct marketing, the message and call-to-action should be crystal clear to the recipient. It’s our job as marketers not to confuse or deceive our audience because once we do, we lose trust.

___________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Swanson is a Marketing Services Specialist with Iron Mountain

By Andy Gerry

I work at a company that is heavily focused on the online user experience for consumer and corporate identity risk management services – and I’m also a print guy. You might think that print wouldn’t be that important of a competency for us, but you would be wrong. Intersections Inc.  is recognized as the preferred partner of major financial institutions providing custom identity management solutions. Clients leverage Intersections’ identity management solutions, offered under their own privately branded labels.

Private labeling. Branding. Corporate Identity– –just a few reasons print is important.

Supporting our customers’ unique brands online is relatively straight forward; doing the same in print is more complex and expensive.  While many of our customers are serviced online for monitoring, alerts and extensive drill-down reports, the majority of our customers still prefer printed fulfillment kits.   

Each customer who successfully enrolls in one of our credit and identity risk management services, either through one of our corporate partners or directly with Intersections, is sent a printed guide for using the services. It is a welcome kit, a user guide, and almost always contains their personal credit data and scores.  This welcome kit sets the tone for the quality of the service that they have enrolled in.

In the past, Intersections created these guides by matching offset printed covers with dynamically produced booklet content. The covers were on heavy, die-cut stock in full color and the booklets were dynamically generated using Group1’s DOC1 and printed in black and white on an IBM 4100 with near-line booklet maker.  While the content was informative and the covers were produced using our clients’ brand colors, the inside didn’t offer a customer experience that was comparable to what Intersections delivers online. For those customers who preferred print to online, there was a tangible lack of color and brand palate inside the guide.

We are always trying to deliver greater flexibility and value to our direct clients – the financial institutions who private label our products – as well as the end consumers of those products. By early 2009 we were convinced that going to a dynamic, full-color environment was the way to remain the leader in our industry. After an exhaustive evaluation of technologies on the market, considering both toner and inkjet solutions from a variety of manufacturers, in 2009 we selected the Océ JetStream 1000 system for printing and GMC PrintNet to compose the documents.

The redesign, reengineering and redeployment of our guides and other documents on the new platform has been tremendously successful. Not only can we support dynamic branding with ease, but we can use color dynamically to highlight key information for consumers and draw their attention to personalized information, much the same way that we do online.  This is not to gloss over the complexity and the hard work it took to architect a high integrity solution that supports multiple partners in a true white paper environment.  It took longer than originally scoped and we learned many lessons on the way.

The good news is that originally we knew we needed two engines for redundancy and failover, but were unsure if enough of our clients would be willing to adopt color to warrant the two engines.  The best case has happened and by the end of the year the majority of our materials will now be printed in full on demand color in our new environment.  Along the way we’ve eliminated the risk of managing preprinted inventories, eliminated the matching process and are able to deliver a superior product to clients and our end customers in a very cost-effective way. Making the printed experience consistent with the online experience – priceless!

Since the conversion to full color, Intersections’ financial services product was rated “Best in Class” by Javelin Strategy & Research (September 2010) and we were ranked among the 500 Top Technology Innovators Across America (2010 InformationWeek 500, September 2010). I’d like to think that us print guys (and gals) had something to do with that!

Last week, I attended the 2011 Xplor International Conference & Vendor Forum, which hosted a number of educational sessions on transactional documents, such as bills and statements, and the infrastructure that enables output and delivery of these mission-critical applications. Not only do these types of documents need to reach 100% of recipients consistently every cycle; many contain sensitive information about each recipient like credit card transactions, investment performance, utility usage, and much more. Considering the applications that are discussed at Xplor, it was no surprise that the recent data breach by database and e-mail marketing firm Epsilon came up in the discussion mix a number of times throughout the conference.

You may have heard about the Epsilon breach through the news, or you may have received an e-mail from one of the major brands affected by the breach like the ones here (courtesy of TDN editor Elizabeth Gooding; click to enlarge):

Depending on peoples’ relationships with these brands, they may have received anywhere from one to six or more of these types of e-mails about the information breach. Those brands affected include some of the biggest in the world, including Citigroup, Chase, Ritz-Carlton, TiVo, and more. In terms of the information that was accessed by attackers, it was limited to names and e-mail addresses associated with those brands. Of course, that’s just enough information to be dangerous for the attackers and whatever intentions they have with use of that data. For the affected, be on the lookout for suspicious-looking e-mails well into the future trying to collect additional information to further their efforts in malicious activity. According to a recent report, Epsilon and its parent company, Alliance Data Systems, face over $100 million in costs and lost sales due to the breach.

Epsilon is not the only service provider that has faced data security troubles in recent years. In December 2010, another e-mail marketing provider, Silverpop Systems, faced a significant data breach and made away with similar details like names, e-mail addresses, and even birth dates from customers linked to brands such as McDonald’s. A few years back, attackers obtained credit card information for over 90 million accounts from retailer TJX Corporation due to weak security standards implemented at their TJ Maxx stores. That breach ended up costing the company over $160 million.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, these types of customer data breaches have a series of negative consequences that go beyond having sensitive information get into the wrong hands:

• Consumers are more susceptible to disguised attacks that collect their information for further misdeeds.
• Brands themselves lose credibility with customers for the misuse of their data.
• Companies of all sizes lose faith and trust in using third-party service providers, including marketing service providers and cloud-based services.
• The federal government is prompted to take a much closer look at data security practices, as well data-driven marketing applications. Expect tighter regulations in the future.

As print service providers across the industry continue to offer more personalized marketing services, they are becoming responsible for their clients’ customer data to help execute those campaigns. Furthermore, to execute cross-media campaigns, many providers are leveraging hosted, third-party solutions that retain customer data. Now that customer data breaches are grabbing headlines again, service providers need to be prepared to answer questions about how data is used in applications, who has access to it, how and where it is stored, and what type of security is protecting that data.

Now would be as good a time as any to do a thorough audit of your company’s own data security practices. If you don’t have any security practices but are handling your clients’ customer data, that should raise many red flags. Even if you don’t deal with the world’s major brands, clients of all sizes from all markets expect their data to be protected when in the hands of a third party. In addition, talk with your vendors and partners about the types of data security that they offer (vendors and partners: you also better have a good answer to those asking questions).

Building trust with clients regarding the use of data is often be a long process, but can end up with great relationships, applications, and results when executed well. That trust can be destroyed in a nanosecond if data is not stored and managed securely, and can end up costing companies big time. In light of these recent breaches, take the time to audit your practices and reassure your clients that their information is being handled in a sound, secure way.

I have to admit that I’m becoming a true believer in the benefits of full-color white paper solutions. This is somewhat surprising since I’ve often been the person saying “black and white is good enough” for many of my client’s applications. (I made money designing those nifty paper stocks!) But, I’ve been watching inkjet technology evolve for some time and have been increasingly impressed with the advances in flexibility, control of ink droplet size, paper handling, power consumption and workflow from a variety of manufacturers. The tipping point has been the opportunity to see an increasing number of solutions in production.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a Press Go webinar with DST Output on the opportunities and challenges involved with adding full color capabilities to a black and white operation.  DSTO has the distinction of operating the largest digital full color print factory in the world (I’ve been to their El Dorado Hills site and it is impressive). DSTO shared details on several case studies where their clients had achieved significant savings by going to a white paper solution. Key savings areas were:

• Reduction in postal costs by consolidating jobs into a single run and thereby increasing the number of mail pieces that qualify for the maximum postal discounts.
• Reduction in storage and management of multiple paper stocks and selective inserts
• Elimination of separate direct mail pieces to existing customers (replacement with full page, dynamic in statement promotions). In many cases, clients didn’t just save money – they made money.

In addition to the savings that accrue to the customer, DSTO drove down their own costs as well. They reduced costs associated with inventory management, paper changes and improved inserter efficiency. At the same time, they were able to reduce turn times and improve quality metrics. DSTO estimated that by going with a full color, white paper in solution that also supported MICR, they were able to produce two to three times the volume with half the warehouse space and seventy-five percent less staff.  

These results are pretty compelling but they didn’t come without some challenges, for example:

• Getting your customers to give up the preprinted stock (and check stock) for a standardized plain stock. You won’t get the benefits of a white paper solution without the white paper.
• Training operations staff – you need to have operators that understand the loose-web press environment but think like a transaction printer in terms of factory controls and post-processing.
• Training customers – document design, file handling and proofing are all different in the color environment and setting expectations early will make your transition – and your customers’ – smoother.
• Estimating for full color inkjet solutions is tricky business and needs to be continually monitored to make sure that job specs don’t change dramatically. Luckily, tools are available to support this process.
• If you want to get the full benefits of a “full color with MICR” solution on white paper, you will need to invest in software to add security features and a back end perfing solution. Also make sure that the MICR option is not just MICR mixed in with the black ’cause that gets expensive fast.
• If you’re not printing color now, you’ll want to make sure you have enough network bandwidth to handle full color files and understand the impact of different levels of graphics on throughput.

Finally, it needs to be said that not everyone has the volumes that DSTO has to make this type of solution efficient. While there are a variety of models available for different volume thresholds, the move to a full color inkjet platform should not be taken on as an “if you build it they will come scenario.” I’ve helped several customers evaluate the business case for moving to full color white paper and the case needs to be made based on a firm’s existing business – not the promise of future deals. The business case and volume threshhold is completely different when looking at toner devices and, of course, cut sheet versus continuous. Quite often, in those cases it is a cost justification that has to be made based on meeting the color requirements of the marketing department (which may not extend to transaction documents).

Very quickly, full color digital inkjet solutions for transaction printing have moved from a “marketing opportunity” to an operational imperative for many companies looking to reduce costs. At the same time, that operational imperative comes with a huge marketing upside for printers and their customers. Anything that gets operations and marketing people to agree gets a big hallelujah from me!

You access a recorded version of the  webinar here. Watch it an you might become a true believer too.

If ever there were an opportunity to personalize documents, it’s school pictures. Yet I spent this morning bleeding out my eyes because I needed personalization and it wasn’t there.

The story starts with poorly designed print documents and online order site that didn’t match one another. The sample was digitally printed, with my order number and customer pin printed underneath the picture of my daughter. Across the top was text inviting me to the website to order additional prints. Yet once I logged in, there was no place to enter the order number, pin, or access her picture. When I clicked the FAQ and “help” links, they took me to answers about tracking orders but nothing about how to place an order in the first place.

So much for the ability of this digital print shop to upsell me with personalized mugs, calendars, and photo books using their e-commerce solution. Huge lost sales opportunity there.

So I went back to the print materials. The sample print had the order number and pin, but it was not accompanied by an actual order form for the pictures. There was some kind of order form, but after further examination, it was for an entirely different type of product.

I finally located the order form printed on the backside of the large window envelope. It was hidden from view, static printed, and clearly ordered in bulk to be as cheap as possible. By the time I cut out the form (after having to turn the packet inside out and extricate it from the folds), I was so frustrated that I forgot where my order number and pin number were located.

There I was, staring at a blank order form from this digital photobook printer, thinking, “Why isn’t this form personalized? What on earth is wrong with these people?”

This should have been a high-margin sale. The printer had already included a sample print with my daughter’s picture on it, her name, the order number, and the pin. I should have opened the packet, pulled out a pre-filled order form, along with pictures of the high-margin upsells the company would have loved to sell me (preferably with my daughter’s picture already imposed upon them). Instead, I wasted nearly 40 minutes looking on the website, sorting through papers, and then filling out a blank order form with information the company already had. By the time I was done, I was so irritated that I placed the smallest order I could get away with just to be done with the whole business.

So if you’re printing any type of form for your clients, be the hero. Pre-filled forms are one of those no-brainer steps that any client sending out forms should be doing. Not only does pre-filling forms decrease the client (or prospect) irritation level, but this simple act of personalization is shown to increase response rates, as well.

For this post, I’m offering my own unscientific perspectives based on a unique window I get to peek into through – my experience actively consulting with or for organizations of all sizes and in all sectors of the industry. This includes everyone from pulp and paper mills to paper merchants to printers to print brokers and finally, print buyers.

My travels take me from coast to coast and north to south here in North America working with over 100 clients in 200 locations per year. From ten-employee in-plants to billion dollar corporations, there are common themes that seem from my perspective to permeate every facet of the paper and print-space.

Necessity may be the Mother of invention, but it’s also the Mother of reduction, the Mother of consolidation and ultimately, the Mother of efficiency. The past few years of recessionary behavior has proven to be a Petri dish of sorts that prove this hypothesis.

Common to every nearly enterprise is the realization that certain functions have had to be reduced or eliminated in order to survive. On the M&A level this means economy of scale and centralization of management, marketing, accounting and human resource functions. Within the same organization, lower level elimination of redundant or non-value added positions has become the norm. I’ve walked in the door of many a facility where “ring the bell/buzzer/phone” for front desk service is now in force where before, the duty of the receptionist was just that; to receive.

If there is a front desk person it is frequently a CSR or AR/AP employee whose new workspace happens to be visibly at the front door of the establishment. The same goes with many other positions where value is perceived as being intangible and can therefore be eliminated and delegated internally to the wearers of many hats who are any enterprise’s new survivor class.

The other trend I’ve seen is that along with staff reduction coinciding with the amount of work coming through the door, where say a full 3 shift operation has been forced down to 2, a new and interesting problem has arisen. When the workload is steady, which is a lowered expectation these days, the available labor pool is being tailored to be able to handle the volume, however now there seems to be more of an optimistic trend among print buyers and advertisers.

It’s what I call the “loosening of the purse-strings syndrome.” As the economy and consumer confidence levels elevate slightly, print buyers are a bit more confident and optimistic. Over the past six to twelve months, my clients, generically now have the problem of not having labor available for those spikes in volume when they occur. In a way this is a good problem to have, since they now feel like they have weathered the economic storm and are now emerging as a more efficient enterprise through all their tribulations.

In some markets an interesting phenomenon is taking place. Where similar facilities with similar capabilities and equipment have either survived or failed, there is a glut of skilled labor. In some cases these spikes are handled by employees working for more than one company-  not that this hasn’t always happened to some degree. It just seems that now there are a lot more skilled operators willing and/or able to be engaged on-call. The problem here is that this is usually more of a mature labor pool, so with regard to longevity, an arrangement such as this is not self-sustaining. No one seems to want to be so optimistic as to ramp back up to former levels, so this conundrum will continue for the foreseeable future.

I don’t pretend to be an economist. I’ll leave that job to Dr. Joe. That said, I do ask the same basic questions wherever I go. How’s business? Have you had layoffs or reductions in the past year and if so, by how much? Have things stabilized? Are you bringing staff back on? Are your customers a bit more optimistic? Are you?

Of course the answers vary, but on average they are: tolerable; yes; yes; yes; yes; yes. It is encouraging if anything, that there is a pervasive optimism out there. In my book optimism equals confidence. Confidence equals risk-taking, albeit cautiously, risk-taking equals spending. Spending of course raises the economic tide overall, and a rising tide lifts all boats.

So ultimately in the printing industry, especially in the areas of growth such as digital printing and integrated media, I’d like to believe that because of all this spending on infrastructure, equipment and new labor, i.e. emerging skill sets, are about to take a quantum leap based on the demand for printing in our brave new world. A renaissance if you will.

To move forward and be the cause of change, mills, merchants, printers and brokers must again refocus their marketing efforts on a now more optimistic print-buying public, who will have a bit more money to spend as long as they are convinced of the ROI once they have been educated, again, by their vendors of the benefits of print.

So, in the end, you can talk about GDP, unemployment, print shipments and the calculated risks of either doing or not doing something to change the game all day long. All I’m saying to sum this all up is that anecdotally, we seem to collectively be climbing out of a casualty-ridden hole, a bit wiser, a bit stronger, but non-the-less gun-shy. In many cases the casualties have been necessary. It got rid of some of the low-ballers to hopefully create a more level playing field where the survivors can compete fairly on a level playing field, charge a fair price and continue to continue on now that the ball is rolling again.

What do you think?

I’m old enough to remember when all we had to work with were fixed-pitch fonts – oh, the horror!

Then, suddenly, proportional fonts were available and BitStream (not Adobe mind you) ruled the font world. Of course, communications across the world began to resemble ransom notes with everyone trying out new fonts– sometimes as many as 20 treatments in a single document -sound familiar?

The rising popularity of Macs among graphic designers (more like a complete overthrow of the PC in that market actually) gave a goose to Adobe Type Manager and soon there were even more fonts being developed and distributed to an unprepared world. Licensing problems on PCs and production printers ensued and consultants and lawyers began to make money controlling the flow of fonts.

Enter the “brand police” who, over the course of the nineties systematically locked down font usage in major corporations to make sure that “corporate identity” was being properly and consistently represented to the world. The idea is that corporate fonts are (nearly) as important as logos and other brand identifiers and should be carefully controlled. Under the watchful eye of the brand police and era of peace and harmony ensued . . .

But corporations aren’t the only users of fonts.

The expansion of publishing online and off – blogs, social media sites, self-published books, the ability to personalize your email template- has created a zealous, perhaps overzealous, group of fans and foes of fonts.

Some are fanatic about font choices perhaps drawing on recently debunked research about the benefits of serif verus sans serif fonts or lists of most popular corporate fonts. Just take a look at Jessica Levco’s piece on “What Does Your Typeface Say About You” which has been published on multiple occasions and always garners comment from font fanatics. You have to love it when people self-identify with “I’m a Calibri” or “I’m a Trebuchet.” Does this foreshadow the next great pick up line: “Hey baby, what font are you?”

On the flip side, there are font activist like the “Ban Comic Sans” group. Seriously. These guys are collecting money and making videos about how much they hate Comic Sans. (I wonder if they are funded by the same people who have been comparing how cats lap up milk versus dogs.)

Fonts are just tools of the trade, folks. I have my favorites but I’m not planning on having them tattooed anywhere. Is it me – or have fonts taken on a level of importance that seems a bit out of proportion?

P.S. I confess I do rather like setting my facebook page to “Pirate” but that’s a whole different facet of personalized publishing!

There has been a lot written recently about changes in printing technology and the transformation of the printing industry, but I have seen little written about one of the other key drivers impacting our industry – software, and more specifically, SAAS or Software-as-a-Service.

As print technology has gotten “better, faster and cheaper” it has caused a shift in the types of companies that are offering specific services along the Marketing Services Value Chain.  Service providers are trying to both demonstrate value to customers through broader offerings and also want to get more volume onto new, more flexible print equipment. Many times, new software is considered when purchasing new printing equipment – perhaps composition software or content management software or web-2-print technology- but, even after acquiring the printer and the software, you still have to invest time and money to develop applications on the new platform – or do you?

There are many SAAS solutions available on the market today specifically geared to getting new print applications up and running fast, without direct investment in the underlying software. While many service providers have jumped on the SAAS band-wagon for delivering white-labeled e-presentment or archiving solutions, few have leveraged SAAS to broaden their print capabilities or offer Transpromo solutions. Below are just a few of the independent  SAAS solutions available on the market today:

• Prospectus and Proxies: Publishing Data Management Inc. 
• Production Print Management: Mimeo (offered to third parties independent of their own store-front) 
• Insurance Policy and Contract Management and various statement applications: NEPS http://www.neps.com/
• Asset  Management Reporting: Client Communication Factory

There are also hosted solutions for fulfillment management, various vertical market statement and confirmation applications and integrated marketing solutions available. The applications and software represented by these platforms would cost a million, or many millions, to replicate – but are typically offered at a very reasonable monthly subscription cost that grows with the number of applications and volume of production used.

In many cases, the key benefit of these solutions to service providers trying to transition to new markets is that they offer the ability to tap into expertise and services as opposed to simply software. Having great power tools (particularly rented ones) doesn’t make you a master carpenter any more than having the top software makes you a programmer – or a vertical business expert. Access to proven platforms, customizable applications ready-to-run, expert consulting support and a price based on actual usage seems like a great way to broaden services without breaking the bank.

If you haven’t considered SAAS yet, why not? If you have, what has your experience been?

It’s no secret that marketing departments are savvy when it comes to direct mail. It’s a channel they’ve traditionally owned. They routinely work with vendors – whether it’s a direct mail house or commercial printshop – who provide access to sophisticated tools for conceiving, creating, composing, personalizing, mail-merging, printing and delivering mailpieces to a designated set of recipients and then measuring campaign effectiveness. For direct mail, they have plenty of tools for interacting with the process, from uploading artwork and providing lists to measuring response rates.

However, when it comes to bills, statements, policies and other production print output, many marketers find it more difficult to navigate the terrain (if they even consider stepping onto it in the first place.)

Why do I think marketers less engaged with production print? For starters, there’s the cultural dimension: IT and Operations versus Marketing. Historically production print has been the domain of the technology, operations or billing department, a silo neatly tucked away from creative and marketing types.

As a result, many marketing execs simply didn’t consider transactional documents as vehicles for their messages. As awareness grows, marketing teams and even CMOs are starting to recognize the value of the transpromo opportunity. This is especially true as they face mounting pressure to deliver more accountability and better results at lower cost. However, because they’re new to the game, they may be unsure of what executing a transpromo campaign entails, or how to engage with their traditional rivals in IT.

If you’re a print services provider, this is a golden opportunity. Maybe you’re already providing direct mail or transactional print services for a particular client. You’ve got a new way to add more business and generate new revenue streams if you can help marketing bridge the gap with IT.

Start by helping marketers understand the potential of adding the statement into the marketing mix. Demonstrate the effectiveness of delivering targeted messages to recipients who are highly likely to spend time with the document. Point out the economies of embedding messages in documents that are delivered in an envelope where the stamp is already paid for.

Keep in mind that you also have to win over their IT and operations folks who will be concerned about production cycles, data integrity and the ability to test. These guys want to know that some marketing flunky is not going to be sticking their fingers in the code the day before (or even the week before) production.

Once you’ve convinced marketing and IT that you have the skills, processes and tools to help them “do transpromo” in a quality controlled and measurable environment, help them foster dialogs with other departments and stakeholders. This might entail determining who maintains the library of messages and conditional business rules that define their use. Finally, provide access to tools that make it as easy to manage content for transaction documents as it is for direct mail – and make sure to measure results. In many cases, the very tools that enable marketers to interact with their suppliers for direct mail campaigns can be adapted for the transpromo world.

In a nutshell, educate them, make the appropriate tools available, facilitate the process, and help marketers track results and ROI. It’s a consultative sell – but well worth the effort if it cements your relationship with existing customers or helps to bring you new ones.

Thoughts? Ideas? I’d love to hear your take on how print service providers can get marketers more engaged with production print.

We are truly in the golden age of printing. It’s an exciting time full of technology convergence, disruption and acceleration. Along with all of this is the necessary sorting out true cost/benefit of any technology including the energy used to run it. As the old adage goes, you can’t track what you don’t measure. This writing explores that philosophy as it pertains to power consumption.

It is generally accepted that digital printing costs less to both you and your customers in terms of both time and money in specific situations, and although this can be true, the question here is how does power fit into the equation?

Hybrid printing facilities have a variety of options when it comes to jobs that at the outset seem more efficient through the use of one technology over another. Do you run it offset or digital? Preprint shells and imprint data or run an otherwise black-only variable data color job on a digital color press? Sure, time and cost can be calculated in terms of BHC and necessary turn around, but for each piece of equipment what is the true cost of the power used to run it?

The power it takes to run digital versus offset equipment can and should be measured on an isolated basis. There are many permanent and portable power meters and data-loggers on the market generally ranging from $600 to $3000 for a three-phase-capable unit. This cost can be viewed as a quick payoff investment to get a true picture of how much power is consumed by each piece of equipment in the shop for a specified duration, either under load, idle or “off”, provided the results are utilized to proper advantage.

For instance, platesetters, digital presses, cutters &c. all are under idle power when not in use. By calculating the idle time power draw and then isolating a production run under full load, a true picture of the actual cost can be achieved. Now how about warm-up time? Obviously a cutter doesn’t have much of one, while a digital press does. Most shops have these machines powered up all day long, idle or not. How much money could be saved by turning off idle devices when not in use? Of course the same can be said for idle workstations, lighting and climate control, but that’s not the focus here.

On the other hand, offset presses, with the exception of associated compressors, chillers, agitators, recirculators, UV units, thermal oxidizers… well, you get the point, along with folders, stitchers and some types of packaging equipment do not draw active power when not in use. They do however draw at the very least phantom power. In all cases, the question comes down to whether there’s a warm-up time, and how much power that activity consumes and whether or not a lockout device should be employed to completely power down when it would otherwise be “turned off”.

Once the true power consumption costs are calculated for any given piece of equipment how could this play into your organization’s strategy? Here are some thoughts:

1. Benchmark costs for power used for jobs on specific equipment;
2. Track unused idle time and phantom power draw, and find ways to eliminate the same;
3. Report on isolated power consumption as part of a formal Life Cycle Analysis (LCA);
4. Use power consumption as an evaluation tool to cost one technology over another;
5. Integrate power isolation metrics into upper management’s continuous improvement dashboard;
6. Incentivize and empower employees to reduce energy use;
7. Empower customers to make the choice of technologies partially based on energy use;
8. Integrate a power reduction strategy into the organization’s sustainability reporting;
9. Normalize power conservation into the organization’s DNA;
10. Become a champion and tell your story to the masses.

What other ideas can you come up with?

Employee Benefits News provided an overview of winning campaigns in their 2010 i-Comm Awards.  The subtitle is: “EBN’s 2010 i-COMM Award winners show how expansive, targeted campaigns can cut through communications clutter to engage workers around health, retirement.” Sounds like our cup of tea right?

There are some interesting notes in here for our industry on the importance of paper in certain circumstances, the necessity for plain language, and the overall importance of clear communications in the success of employee benefits programs. Generally speaking, if you are serving clients in the health and benefits business, EBN is an excellent source for marketing and regulatory information.

How much time do you spend researching pain points and opportunities for your target vertical markets? What sources do you recommend for getting up to speed on various verticals?

I was just reading an interview with Tony Cox, founder of the multichannel food consultancy 5th Food Group, in Multichannel Merchant. Halfway through, I stopped and said, “Huh? Did I really read that?”

Cox had been asked whether he recommended mailing catalogs anymore or whether catalogs are playing a new role for direct merchants in an online world. He said,

“It’s simple economics—as costs for paper and postage continue to rise, and response rates stay flat or fall, the costs of acquiring customers via list rental is becoming prohibitively expensive.

“Case in point, if the proposed postal rate increase goes through in January, it will be another nail in the coffin for both the Postal Service and for smaller catalog companies.”

Did you see it? The implication was it is becoming prohibitively expensive to acquire customers via list rental by sending them unsolicited catalogs as a prospecting tool. Therefore — and Mr. Cox didn’t say this, but in context — the reader was left to assume that the alternative in today’s postal climate was electronic media.

Mr. Cox did mention catalogs reducing page counts, but there wasn’t a single mention of personalization.

Instead of just writing off print for prospecting, as was implied, why not just switch your prospecting to postcards? Pitch the catalog, then let people choose the products on which they would like information. Send them to a personalized URL, where they can select their product categories, then get them excited about watching for their personalized catalogs in the mail.

If you want to boost response rates, over-size the cards and laminate them. Are they more expensive than traditional postcards? Of course! But they’ll be cheaper to send than catalogs! Then when you do send catalogs, they’ll be slimmer and more cost-effective.

With today’s personalization technologies, creating personalized catalogs is easier than ever. Software vendors like Gluon have created online-based solutions optimized for creating publications that are absolutely terrific. Even small companies can use them. Especially when customers self-select their own categories, there is no excuse for not personalizing these days.

The bottom line is that there is no need to abdicate print. Catalogers just need to do it smarter!

It’s too bad that message didn’t make it into the interview.

It was a dark and stormy night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets. No. It was a bright and windy afternoon in the City of Big Shoulders. I had just landed at O’Hare and was waiting for my hotel shuttle.

The fifty-ish business woman to my left had no secrets. She was engrossed in a discussion on her i-Berrydroidpod oblivious to the world around her and with whom she was sharing her conversation, namely me. Now I’m not a habitual eavesdropper, but this was so blatant I couldn’t help but absorb her end of the dialogue. I’m sure you’ve all been there.

She started out with instructions to her subordinate– edits pertaining to some document: “Move this paragraph here; add the sub-head for Obstetrics there; start a new chapter on page 87; be sure and link the footnotes” & so on. By now it was obvious this had something to do with the medical profession and was some type of publication, to what purpose I could not discern. Then came the kicker—“I guess we should get a thousand printed”, she said matter-of-factly.

At that moment, my old printer instincts kicked in and my ears perked up. Although I muffled the impulse to be a good-printing samaritan and come to her rescue, calculations started rolling through my brain bucket. Let’s see, this publication whatever its purpose is most likely a minimum of one-hundred pages; times one-thousand copies is one-hundred thousand digital 8 ½ x 11 clicks at the very least. A decent job for any short-run facility.

Did she have a use for that many, or was it simply a Pavlovian response to cost-per-piece-effectiveness training she received in an earlier life?

I thought by now the digital printing industry would have finally conditioned all customers to think print-on-demand until the cows came home. It hasn’t penetrated everywhere. This job could have been suited for short-run offset, or toner-based or high-speed ink-jet digital depending on the real, albeit unknown situation. The issue was that it didn’t sound like there was any fleshing-out of the true needs of the project. “I guess we should get a thousand printed”. A nice round number.

At face value It didn’t sound like a situation that warranted a variable data application, but who knows, with the right coaching it could have turned into a marvelous project incorporating a PURL and the opportunity for users to custom-build a piece based on relevance, or to personalize an event-specific version for a particular demographic. It may have even had TransPromo applications (more likely PubPromo), all of which could have saved a tremendous amount in terms of cost and waste.

In one of my past lives many moons ago I played a game with my clients called “let’s look in the closet”. Every print buyer had a closet of one kind or another. Sometimes it was a walk-in, sometimes a warehouse. The point was to discover their printed material graveyards and guide them to more cost and resource-effective digitally-enabled behavior.

The point is that even today, while we busy ourselves with transpromo, social media and cross-disciplinary integration, we tend to forget that there are still basics to be dealt with out there in printbuyerland, and the distressing fact is that the path of least resistance remains alive and well.

As the woman hopped into her shuttle, still stridently chatting about her project without missing a beat as she handed the driver her bags, I couldn’t help but wonder if her printer, in-plant or commercial, would question the wisdom of “I guess we should get a thousand printed”. Would you?