Top 12 Best Practices for Effective 1:1 Printing

Best-in-class marketers are personalizing their marketing communications. Marketers that are not personalizing are increasingly falling behind. An Aberdeen Group study tells the tale.

In its study, “Analytics for the CMO,” the market research firm found that of “best in class” marketers (defined as being in the top 20% of sales and profitability), 39% are actively “targeting offers to optimize marketing ROI” and 30% are “optimizing marketing activities at each touchpoint along the customer lifecycle.”

“With 67% more top performers than other firms (30% vs. 18%) ensuring the right message, to the right person, at the right time, the ability to better pinpoint marketing activity to maximize its effect is well-demonstrated by how top performers are refining their strategies,” the study concludes.

Aberdeen also found that the differences in average sales growth and customer retention rates between best-in-class marketers and the rest of the industry were stark. For example, best-in-class marketers exhibited:

• 9.9% average YOY improvement in incremental sales lift resulting from marketing campaigns vs. 1.1% for the industry average and a 3.6% decline among laggards.
• 9.5% average YOY increase in customer retention rate vs. 2.1% among industry average and a 3.2% decline for laggard firms. 

You certainly can’t argue with those kinds of numbers.

How do you go about applying best-in-class strategies to your targeted and personalized marketing? Here is a set of best practices to keep in mind.

1. Traditional marketing rules apply.

When marketers begin implementing 1:1 printing applications, there can be the misperception that because of its personalized nature alone, the 1:1 piece will drive response. But 1:1 print marketing is still marketing, and the creative, the message, the offer, the segmentation, the call to action, and the incentive, among other components of the marketing campaign, determine success. The personalized nature of the communication must be part of the larger strategy.

2. Focus on relevance, not “personalization.”

It doesn’t matter how “personalized” a document is. If it isn’t relevant to the person receiving it, that personalization is worthless. You can adjust the text to reflect the recipient’s gender, age, and household income, for example, and customize images to the hilt, but if the offer itself doesn’t have a clear relevance to the recipient, the response may not differ much from that of a generic campaign, if at all.

Burns & McBride Home Comfort and its printer, Modern Mail, experienced this lesson firsthand. When looking to boost sales for its healing and cooling solutions, the company started out with a generic direct mail piece. The results were described as “virtually non-existent.” A second mailing that included personalized URLs but no other personalization had better results. But a third, fully-personalized mailing using demographic segmentation, empathetic and educational messaging based on knowledge of the target audience, and layered with personalization, had tremendous impact. The effort (produced on a Canon 7000 ImageRunner) not only resulted in a much higher response rate, but it had a tremendous conversion rate, as well. The campaign netted 100 new customers and $1.6 million in new business!

3. In each campaign, focus on a single, meaningful segment of your database rather than mailing to the whole list.

Unless there is a reason to mail to the entire list, you might want to carefully cull your list for the most likely respondents to each particular offer. This not only “right sizes” your print mailings, but it also minimizes the number of irrelevant communications that would otherwise be thrown into the trash. You are restricting that investment to the most valuable prospects.

If you are doing a fundraiser, for example, you might want to select only people who have been out of school for at least five years, giving them a chance to increase their earning potential and gain disposable income. If you are a retailer trying to boost end-of-month revenues, you might want to mail only to customers who are in the top 25% spending bracket.

4. Get to know your customers, then market to what you know.

The more you know your customers, the better you will be able to develop relevant marketing campaigns. When the National Hockey League committed to developing 1:1 communications for its customers, for example, it asked them to fill out a survey that indicated where they lived and their favorite hockey team. In analyzing the results, it learned something surprising. Approximately 40% of its fan base lives outside their favorite team’s home market. That means these fans can’t easily go to games or access highlights. Imagine the product development opportunities for the league!

What is that that perhaps you don’t already know about your customers that might allow you to create relevance in a more powerful way? To find out, you might start with an investment in basic database analytics. Who are your 10% by frequency? Volume? Margins? What do these customers look like? Identify what they have in common (age, income, marital status, ethnicity, purchase habits? in a B2B environment, vertical market, employee size, annual revenues?). Who are your bottom 10%? What do they look like? Are they customers you think you can woo back?

Creating such profiles can pay dividends in prospecting, too. If you know what your best customers look like, you can maximize your prospecting lists by matching the purchased list to that profile.

5. Use multiple channels.

Your customers and prospects are bombarded with marketing messages. To break through the clutter and stay top of mind, you need to reinforce the message through multiple channels. According to research conducted by

InfoTrends, when asked the average number of media types used in a direct marketing campaign, marketers said:

• One channel — 8.1%
• Two channels — 30.5%
• Three channels — 38.0%
• Four or more — 15.1%

Not only are multiple channels critical for reinforcing the message, but you never know which channel your customers will respond to. Some will respond to direct mail contacts, while others will respond more to email, mobile marketing, or social media.

API Marketing (formerly Auburn Printers & Integrated Marketing) has been listening closely to the benefits of multi-channel marketing. When it went through a year-long campaign to rebrand itself from a printing company to a marketing firm, it developed a multi-phase campaign that incorporated direct mail with Personalized URLs (output on its Canon700VP Digital Press), social media, email, press releases, newspaper ads with QR Codes, and much more. In general, we might expect a good, well-designed personalized, multi-channel campaign to see response rates from 10-30%. This campaign achieved an eye-popping 56% direct mail response rate alone.

6. Pre-fill any forms involved in the campaign.

If your campaign involves response forms, pre-fill those forms with as much information as possible. This is information you likely already have, and by prefilling, you remove a key barrier to response. Split tests on mailings with pre-filled forms vs. generic forms consistently show a significant bump in response rates simply by using pre-filled forms to make the card faster and easier to mail.

7. Provide multiple response mechanisms.

Not every segment of your customer base wants to respond the same way. Give them multiple response mechanisms — phone, tear-out forms, personalized URLs, Web links, and QR Codes (including those embedding personalized URLs) — depending on the target audience. Let them respond on your Facebook page, if you want to. The point is simply getting them to respond.

In one 1:1 campaign, for example, the marketer offered recipients the opportunity to respond to the survey using a personalized URL or by filling out a tear-out card. It found a surprisingly high percentage of tear-out cards returned, many of them from older recipients who were not comfortable giving out certain information online. In another campaign, the marketer found 65% of responses came by phone and 35% by personalized URL, even though this was a more Internet-savvy audience.

8. Centralize your database, then invest.

Make investing in your database a priority. It takes time, dedicated resources, and manpower, but this is one of the most important marketing investments you can make. Develop a basic marketing database, aggregating and centralizing the data into a single, optimized customer contact list that includes demographics and channel preferences, then continue to refine it, add variables, update it, and maintain it over time. As you gather information about your customers, get that data back into your database to be used in future marketing programs.

9. Think about costs differently.

In order to benefit from 1:1 printing, marketers need to think in new ways and evaluate the success of these marketing programs differently than they have in the past. Cost per lead, cost per response, and ROI are an entirely different language, but this is a language that, if marketers want to be profitable, they need to learn.

This lesson was learned by Modern Mail and its client RAMP, a marketing agency that specializes in the marketing needs of dentists. One of the end users of the program, a specialty dental practice (Dr. Wilhelm), was looking to increase its business from referrals from general dental practictioners. Using a direct mail program (printed on Modern Mail’s Canon 7000 ImageRunner), the campaign’s 4.06% response rate resulted in a record number of referrals for the practice. At an average of $20,000 in revenue generated from each referral, the campaign paid for itself many times over.

A comment from the case study (which can be found in PODi’s best practices case studies archive) says it all:

A really eye-opening outcome of this particular project is that the marketing agency learned that [for 1:1 printing campaigns] the traditional metrics go straight out the window. The reality is that traditional metrics like cost-per-piece, number mailed and even response rates are not terribly meaningful. The true metric measures business closed, which in this case was how many new referrals (and on-going referral relationships) result from the campaign.

10. Measure everything, both costs and results.

According to the Aberdeen study (“Analytics for the CMO”), 82% of best-in-class marketers track, measure, and report on all marketing campaign results and 64% have a process to test effectiveness of campaign content.

For best-in-class results, you need a commitment to measurement too. What kind of return did you get on that direct mailing? That email blast? That social media campaign? Many companies have no idea. Before you can truly evaluate the success of 1:1 printing (especially against other campaigns), you need to track and measure everything along the way. Be sure to build in bar codes, redemption codes, or other mechanisms so you know who responded and when. Track your conversion to sale and per order sales.

11. Use data wisely—respect privacy

Data privacy is a topic that affects us all these days. Although we are all familiar with misuses of online data, even print is impacted by privacy issues, especially 1:1. If used inappropriately, the inclusion of personal data may irritate or offend recipients beyond repair.

For example, say you have a database of new births. Over time, this gives you knowledge of the names of parents and the ages of their children. What could you do with this information? You could send a postcard saying, Hello, Jane Smith at 144 North Gate Road. We hear that your precious daughter, Emma, is turning three today! 

Instead of getting a sale, you are more likely to get an irate parent showing up at your office, threatening to remove your kneecaps because you have just invited a stranger to show up on his lawn with a bunch of balloons.

A better use of this data is to create relevance without over-personalizing. You might send a postcard saying, “Got a Special Day Coming Up?” and offering deep discount on toys appropriate to the age of the recipient’s child (Of course, make sure your mailing list is up to date before you do!)

Are there times that it’s appropriate to use very personal data? Sure, when the recipient is a regular customer; when that customer has opted in to receive such documents; or when the information is concealed within a sealed envelope. Cross-sells or upsells from a customer’s financial company are good examples.

12. Test everything.

If you are going to spend the money on creating personalized variables, you want to be using variables that will benefit the program. For example, if you are marketing automobiles, it may not matter if the marketing piece shows a man or a woman behind the wheel. It might be much more useful to pair an image of a minivan to recipients who have children or pair hybrid compacts with recipients in areas known for environmental sensitivity regardless of the gender of the recipient.

How do you know which variables are relevant to your audience and which are not? Testing! For example, in a 10,000 print run, you might want to select 500 pieces and make a simple change (add or remove or change a variable) and see how it impacts the results. Does the addition of personalized images increase the response rate? If so, by how much? When you add in the cost of the additional variable, does it cost justify? What if you increase the offer by 10%? 15%? 25% At what point does the increased response rate and value per sale not justify the additional discount?

Just Do It

1:1 printing is no longer an experimental marketing technique. It is proven marketing approach with a long track record. If you do your homework, analyzing a variety of applications similar to the one you intend to produce, it should give you a good sense of what kind of results you can expect.

In launching a 1:1 program, adjust your methods of monitoring and measuring success. Cost per piece is no longer the “end all, be all.” ROI, cost per sale, and similar methods should be used.

In order to maximize results, 1:1 printing (like any marketing) requires continual refining. Measure, test, and measure again. Your first set of variables may not be the most effective way to use your data. Integrate different media into the campaign. See which combination gets the best results. Continually refine the process over time. Don’t assume that your first crack at 1:1 printing reflects the success you will always have in the process.

If you haven’t yet integrated 1:1 printing into your marketing strategy, it’s time to get off the sidelines. The costs have become very reasonable, and there are large number of experienced practitioners vying for your business. With such a respected track record and with the wide range of options available, it makes sense to give it a test drive and see what opportunities it might open for you.