Printers in Transition: Making Magjek Together

Magjak Printing Co., a Port Chester, N.Y. creative marketing and cross-media production services company, decided to approach a national tour operation with 50,000 members in an effort to gain a new client by showing off its variable data capabilities.

The private travel club company, Club ABC Tours in Bloomfield, N.J., is a subsidiary of Crown Travel Service Inc., and was founded more than four decades ago. It is one of the largest travel clubs in the world, providing tour packages for individuals and families who travel frequently and appreciate value travel.

In order to produce unique text for 20,000 direct mail pieces, Magjak used XMPie PersonalEffect software. The intention of the personalized direct-mail campaign was to acquire new members and incent travel among current members of ABC Tours.

And it worked. The campaign generated a return of more than 10 times Club ABC Tour’s initial investment in just the first month’s sales. Not only did the campaign result in nearly $500,000 in new revenue and bookings in the first month, but it also successfully recruited nearly 150 new members in that same time.

Abbra Cadabara

Magjak Printing, which was founded in 1980, approached ABC Tours with its capabilities and told the travel company that it would handle the database management, printing, mailing, and fulfillment of the brochure.

“We had to decide who to target,” noted Magjak Managing Partner Bruce Browning, “because the database of active and inactive clients was so large. ABC had very good data. They knew the destination preferences of their clients as well as the usual names and addresses.”

“We’ve had variable data capabilities for about six years. Print is not the end sale.”

The creative team at Magjak designed and created the eye-catching color brochure. “ABC Tours used to mail a 30-page book of destination information to clients,” Browning explained. Now the company mails its clients a single personalized brochure.

The stimulus-themed direct-mail piece was designed to encourage recipients to travel, despite the stressful economic climate, by pointing out the values delivered through the buying power of travel clubs.

The piece featured three types of dynamic cover designs. One included a personalized image of a suitcase with an airline baggage tag, featuring each recipient’s name and a destination that he/she would be most interested in visiting based on previous trips.

Another version displayed an image montage of locales the recipient would most likely want to visit. A third design displayed a more subdued graphic with trip recommendations. The cover themes featured a travel message that varied depending on whether the recipient was a current or prospective customer. The mailer also included a fully personalized correspondence, featuring offers ranging from two-for-one membership rates to discounts on trips.

The Power Behind the Show

By capitalizing on PersonalEffect’s ability to natively leverage Adobe InDesign, allowing the data to drive the design, Magjak was able to use its existing Adobe knowledge-base to quickly and efficiently develop the high-impact mailer. The printer used an Xerox iGen digital press to print the pieces.

“XMPie PersonalEffect’s powerful rule and data integration engines made leveraging the analytics results derived from Club ABC Tour’s data a breeze,” said Browning. “It allowed us to smoothly and effectively integrate with the creation and production processes, making it possible for us to better target recipients with highly relevant messages, and track the results from each of the nine segments we created.”

PersonalEffect Print is XMPie’s server-based VDP solution. If a printing company often produces high volumes of VDP output, handles a large number of VDP jobs at one time or requires online connections to data, then the increased production power delivered by PersonalEffect Print will help. PersonalEffect Print includes uCreate and uPlan—all the necessary XMPie Desktop Tools needed for data and design tasks.

In addition to enhanced productivity, this server-based solution also provides the added benefit of allowing a printer’s data experts, designers and production specialists to work within their own disciplines on specific tasks, automatically combining the results into a cohesive one-to-one communication piece with minimal workflow constraints.

Bag of Tricks

Magjak has expanded over the years, and now occupies over 14,000 square feet and is located a few minutes from both Stamford, Conn., and New York City. The company’s full suite of services has expanded as well, and now encompasses two distinct areas: printing and mail production and direct marketing.

Print and mail production includes variable data printing, Web-to-print, mailing and fulfillment, and pre-media. Direct marketing encompasses personalized, targeted marketing; personal URLs and micro sites; variable-content direct marketing; and cross-media personalization.

With all of these technical capabilities and the marketing success of the ABC Tours’ piece, Magjak has been able to lure new clients during this tough year. “We’ve had variable data capabilities for about six years,” noted Browning. “Print is not the end sale.”