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The biggest concern commercial printers have when entering the direct mail market place is the entire issue of data management. It has become a common theme of industry pundits that printing is no longer about putting ink on paper—though we still know how to do that better than anyone else—but about managing data. To manage it, you really have to start by knowing what it is you have, and that's something printers who have "simply" been putting ink on paper have difficulty doing.

Integrated Marketing Solutions, a direct marketing research company said, "First and foremost, get the right list, and get it right! It is very critical that you set the criteria for the recipients of your direct mail piece. What does that mean for your business? Let's break it down. Sixty percent of your mail's success depends on the list itself. It is imperative that you obtain a mailing list with the correct target audience for your product or services. If you send your direct mail pieces to the wrong audiences, your message would be irrelevant, and your money wasted. As important as it is to have the right audience in mind, equally important is to have a list that is current. Not only are you saving money on postage by using a clean and current data, you are actually increasing the success of your direct mail campaign."

The first thing printers need to know is exactly what data they have, and what can be done with it. One or the other is not sufficient. Knowing how to handle data does no good if you don't have the specific data you need, and having that data does no good if you don't know how to use it. What seems surprising to many is how little most printers know about what can be done with data: how it can be leveraged to perform many "magic tricks" for direct mail customers. The same data that can create simple address labels might also be used to generate personalized URLs (PURLs), or grab appropriate images or text that speaks volumes to the recipient of the direct mail piece. Indeed, the success of direct mail printing is largely based on how the raw data is leveraged.

Data mining, and applying and managing "hooks" for that data, are also important aspects of direct mail management. The ability to collect, purge, clean, and reformat data in useful ways is nearly as critical as being able to juggle that data once you have it. It may seem as though data should be extremely flexible, but that isn't always the case. How the fields are broken down, and the manner in which hooks such as keywords, tab delineations, and XML data can be accessed, will determine how the data can be used.

Know Your Capabilities

Few things could leave a more bitter taste in the mouths of customers than promising something you can't actually deliver, but this scenario is much too common in the direct mail market. Direct mail jobs are becoming more and more complex, in part because printers and their customers are becoming more and more sophisticated in their use of new technology. But that complexity also leaves more points in the chain where breaks can occur.

For example, on a variable data job, a misfeed of one envelope can produce a disastrous result if the equipment and software being used cannot determine that the error has occurred, and adjust the rest of the run so all of the envelopes get the correct content. Printers must also be able to know whether they can guarantee 100 percent deliverability of every address in the database, or whether they need to have some margin for error. If a piece is damaged in production, will it need to be replaced, or is it acceptable that one piece out of a 50,000 piece mailing won't be missed in the overall results?

In addition to contractual liability, there is also a question of production capabilities and meeting deadlines. Will the equipment be able to run job X at the same speeds as job Y, or will the envelope or paper stock specified in the job slow things down? While these are questions printers deal with all the time, the potential complexity of sophisticated direct mail—and particularly variable print—applications does increase the potential for problems. It takes a good deal of experience with a wide variety of jobs to get a good feel for how smoothly a given job can be expected to run through production.

The Customer's Needs

It's hard for printers to know what's going on inside a customer's head, but the more opportunity you have to learn exactly what it is they need, the better you can service those needs. Printers have found that many of their customers really don't know what they need, and that the best thing they can do—both for themselves and for those customers—is to help them find out.