| Direct Marketing Offers: What Strategies Work Best? When considering a direct mail piece such as a postcard, if your goal is for the customer to take action, there are certain tried and true methods that will drive response rates. The question is, how do you apply these offers while maintaining strong product margins? Let's take a look at some twists on the old favorites. Start with a big idea. A strong offer is the primary driver of response. A well-designed piece is important, but it will still fall flat if the offer isn't strong. Before you start design, focus on that big idea. Appeal to Emotion When it comes to emotion, reach for a visceral topic that touches a nerve. Today, the economy presents an opportunity to use emotion to drive response. Check out #1 on the left (click the image to read the copy, it focuses on the community benefits of local manufacturing). Tap Into a Trend There are a number of important trends out there today; the question is, how to tap into them? #2 attempts to do just that by tapping into the green trend, with a strong commitment to push recycled paper as the primary offer of the effort. Highlight the Value With the exciting new technologies printers are installing today, it's easy to identify areas where there is increased value. Take for example, #3, where boring typewriter personalization is replaced by bold, large type and even a photograph. It quickly conveys the value of personalization and flexibility of today's cutting-edge technologies. Promote What's Hard One thing I've seen in my 20 years in the printing industry is that at any given slice in time, there's been technologies that are alluring for their potential yet difficult for customers to get their arms around. Today is no different, and the challenge revolves around data-driven workflows, be it personalization of text or images, or the powerful integration of print with the Internet. #4 taps into this trend, focusing on PURLs and response rates. Put Something on Sale Sales work. Just ask Macy's or any other department store. They are a great way to introduce a bold new service, as is the case of the offer in #5. #6 does this in another way, by creating a price list designed to compete with the "Internet Printers". Give Something for Free Free is by far the most powerful word in direct response. The trouble is, it's hard to make money when you give your product away. Then again, there are a number of ways to take advantage of the power of this word while still maintaining revenue and margin. In our examples, #7 creates an offer for a second item to be printed free when ordered with the first, excluding paper. By ganging the jobs together, it is presumed you could promote this offer at a reasonably low marginal manufacturing cost, while still enjoying full-margin revenue on the primary item. #8 uses one of our guides to create a high-value free offer, great for cold leads or inactive customers to try to get the ball rolling. |
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| eNewsletter Solution Delivers for Holland Litho "Now that we have worked with White & Associates for a year, our sales force is so dependent on the newsletters that if push came to shove, they would rather give up all other forms of marketing and keep the newsletters. They give amazing results." Rick Baarman Rick expresses what we at White & Associates have been saying for years: Email newsletters are a great way to engage the customer and prospect. Holland Litho has an on-going marketing program with us that includes the following elements:
To deliver this content, we produce:
The program succeeds by keeping Holland's brand in front of the customer, by positioning Holland as a regional leader, by implying quality print by producing quality content both in terms of writing and production values. Our technology is an important component of the solution. It provides:
You can see a sample of Rick's email newsletter here. Or feel free to visit his companion Web site at www.hollandresources.com. For more information on White & Associates, please contact Patrick White at 617.848.2626 or email pwhite@wadigital.com. Thank you! |  |
The Dirt on Data
When it comes to digital printing and broadcast email, the quality of your list data is an important factor in meeting your turn-around expectations. There are three data issues we routinely encounter that mailers should watch for.
Name Personalization. Study after study has shown that the more personalized a mailing, the better the results. Personalization of course starts with the name, or first (given) name more precisely. Yet our maiiling clients sometimes only have their list available with the name combined as one full-name field. Don't despair if you have difficulty exporting your list with the name as two discrete fields. Now it's easy to convert with our Name Splitter tool.
Address Export Format. If you produce printed mail, your vendor uses powerful mail processing software that standardizes the addressing of your mail based on postal regulations designed to qualify you for the best postage rate available. This software requires that address data be exported as separate fields (address 1, address 2, city, state, zip). If the address information is formatted as a single field, the data will need extra processing and time to carefully check the result for accuracy.
Missing or Incomplete Record Data. We routinely see records within lists that lack the basic information required to mail, such as missing or incorrect zip codes, address information, or contact names.
Broadcast Email. Broadcast email lists have their own issues. First, it's important to validate the email address for each person on your list, which is easy with a technology call regular expressions. Second, you need to ensure your email is designed with conditional logic if you want to personalize it, so that a field with missing information doesn't look stupid (think 'Dear :' if the first name isn't available. Third, you need to ensure the availability of contacts who have requested information or subscribed to your email program. And finally, there are legal requirements (at least in the U.S.) regarding unsubscribe/opt-out options for recipients of your campaigns.
Get a handle on these three issues for the smoothest possible broadcast email or personalized print print experience, minimizing the potential for delays.
For great tools to help you clean up your data, try our list tools available to the left. Some are free, some are inexpensive, and they all serve vital functions to enable you to quickly validate, transform or otherwise manipulate your list. Try them out!
Advanced Personalization of Content for Print & Email
Beyond 'Dear John' Personalization. The early days of variable print conjure up images of dot-matrix printers and personalized salutations. Today's state-of-the-art systems provide both enhanced flexibility and true commercial print quality for each piece produced, as well as flexible, powerful broadcast email tools (like ours) that give you both substitution and conditional logic options for personalization.
Understanding the Possibilities. With variable data digital printing, each piece produced has the potential to be unique. This is achieved by marrying a base layout with specific information associated with the recipient.
Substitution Variables. An example is a salutation such as Dear [=firstname=], which uses a simple substitution variable to insert each recipient's first name. Each variable that will be substituted must have its own unique placeholder. Our software links the placeholder value, in this case [=firstname=], with the corresponding field, which in this case is the first name field of your data.
For an example of simple substitution values, check out our list of built-in variables for our broadcast email service.
Substitution variables are not limited to the standard name-and-address fields of a typical contact record. There is no limitation on the placeholders you can insert in your layouts; of course, each placeholder must have a field associated with it in your data set.
Substitution Variable Options
Substitution variables aren't limited to text, either. There are actually five types of substitution variables we can define for a given run:
Text. The most basic variable type, a text value in the record replaces the placeholder text in the layout.
Calculation. A calculation variable combines one ore more variable values and static text to create the value for each record. You could calculate the [=fullname=] variable, for example, by combining [=firstname=], a space and [=lastname=].
Color. You can specify Pantone or CMYK color values as a variable: Define a color not otherwise used as a placeholder, and we replace all instances of that color with the color associated with each record or with a logic statement (e.g. if male, blue; if female, red).
Image. You can create image substitution variables by including a file name with the data for each record. You'll need to supply us with all of the files that will be substituted, along with the image placeholder file name that has been included in the master layout.
Layout. Finally, you can define multiple base layouts for your job if you identify the layout file to use with each record. An example of where this might be applicable would be an event sponsored by two organizations. Invitations mailed to each contact could reflect the branding of the organization that supplied the contact be processed.
Rules to Simplify Data
In the layout example mentioned previously, you wouldn't have to specify the layout as part of your data set. If there is a field identifying the source of the contact, we can write a rule that determines the file to use based on the value of the source field. That way, you don't have to merge frequently-appearing values into every contact record you create.
When it comes to digital printing and broadcast email, the quality of your list data is an important factor in meeting your turn-around expectations. There are three data issues we routinely encounter that mailers should watch for.
Name Personalization. Study after study has shown that the more personalized a mailing, the better the results. Personalization of course starts with the name, or first (given) name more precisely. Yet our maiiling clients sometimes only have their list available with the name combined as one full-name field. Don't despair if you have difficulty exporting your list with the name as two discrete fields. Now it's easy to convert with our Name Splitter tool.
Address Export Format. If you produce printed mail, your vendor uses powerful mail processing software that standardizes the addressing of your mail based on postal regulations designed to qualify you for the best postage rate available. This software requires that address data be exported as separate fields (address 1, address 2, city, state, zip). If the address information is formatted as a single field, the data will need extra processing and time to carefully check the result for accuracy.
Missing or Incomplete Record Data. We routinely see records within lists that lack the basic information required to mail, such as missing or incorrect zip codes, address information, or contact names.
Broadcast Email. Broadcast email lists have their own issues. First, it's important to validate the email address for each person on your list, which is easy with a technology call regular expressions. Second, you need to ensure your email is designed with conditional logic if you want to personalize it, so that a field with missing information doesn't look stupid (think 'Dear :' if the first name isn't available. Third, you need to ensure the availability of contacts who have requested information or subscribed to your email program. And finally, there are legal requirements (at least in the U.S.) regarding unsubscribe/opt-out options for recipients of your campaigns.
Get a handle on these three issues for the smoothest possible broadcast email or personalized print print experience, minimizing the potential for delays.
For great tools to help you clean up your data, try our list tools available to the left. Some are free, some are inexpensive, and they all serve vital functions to enable you to quickly validate, transform or otherwise manipulate your list. Try them out!
Advanced Personalization of Content for Print & Email
Beyond 'Dear John' Personalization. The early days of variable print conjure up images of dot-matrix printers and personalized salutations. Today's state-of-the-art systems provide both enhanced flexibility and true commercial print quality for each piece produced, as well as flexible, powerful broadcast email tools (like ours) that give you both substitution and conditional logic options for personalization.
Understanding the Possibilities. With variable data digital printing, each piece produced has the potential to be unique. This is achieved by marrying a base layout with specific information associated with the recipient.
Substitution Variables. An example is a salutation such as Dear [=firstname=], which uses a simple substitution variable to insert each recipient's first name. Each variable that will be substituted must have its own unique placeholder. Our software links the placeholder value, in this case [=firstname=], with the corresponding field, which in this case is the first name field of your data.
For an example of simple substitution values, check out our list of built-in variables for our broadcast email service.
Substitution variables are not limited to the standard name-and-address fields of a typical contact record. There is no limitation on the placeholders you can insert in your layouts; of course, each placeholder must have a field associated with it in your data set.
Substitution Variable Options
Substitution variables aren't limited to text, either. There are actually five types of substitution variables we can define for a given run:
Text. The most basic variable type, a text value in the record replaces the placeholder text in the layout.
Calculation. A calculation variable combines one ore more variable values and static text to create the value for each record. You could calculate the [=fullname=] variable, for example, by combining [=firstname=], a space and [=lastname=].
Color. You can specify Pantone or CMYK color values as a variable: Define a color not otherwise used as a placeholder, and we replace all instances of that color with the color associated with each record or with a logic statement (e.g. if male, blue; if female, red).
Image. You can create image substitution variables by including a file name with the data for each record. You'll need to supply us with all of the files that will be substituted, along with the image placeholder file name that has been included in the master layout.
Layout. Finally, you can define multiple base layouts for your job if you identify the layout file to use with each record. An example of where this might be applicable would be an event sponsored by two organizations. Invitations mailed to each contact could reflect the branding of the organization that supplied the contact be processed.
Rules to Simplify Data
In the layout example mentioned previously, you wouldn't have to specify the layout as part of your data set. If there is a field identifying the source of the contact, we can write a rule that determines the file to use based on the value of the source field. That way, you don't have to merge frequently-appearing values into every contact record you create.
