Industry News
New ways of communicating yield higher results
By
May 18, 2005, 08:59

Research from Interquest shows that one-third of digital color work will be personalized by next year. By 2010, 20 percent of all print jobs will be turned around in 24 hours. And today, 78 percent of four-color jobs are shorter than 5,000 pages, as indicated in a study done by Dr. Joe Webb of Strategies for Management.

Studies of print operations show that the majority of printing costs and revenue opportunities are locked inside workflow. InfoTrends/CAP Ventures reports that 80 to 85 percent of the cost in printing operations is in non-printing activities, such as preparation work and customer approvals. Digital workflow is about reducing these costs and reconfiguring the communications platform, from creation to distribution.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that traditional Direct Marketing has a 1% to 2% response rate. If it is a color piece, then add ½%. Versional (which means different versions of the same letter) adds about 50% to the response rate, while personalizing the piece will increase the response rate by as much as 150%. Now if the piece is both customized and personalized, you can get about 500% better response rate. By fully customizing a piece (truly 1 to 1 marketing) you can have a response rate of 20% or more (fully 1000% - 2,000% better than a generic mailpiece).

There has to be a change in mindset for the marketers to embrace this new form a communication. For those who are conditioned to make buying decisions based on cost per piece, they need to realize that results matter. Higher response rates and increased business justify costs associated with customized products and digital printing.

There also has to be a commitment to collect data about all of your current customers and even project what your prospects look like as well. A lot of companies have this information, only not all in one place. Some of the data resides in the billing department, others in the sales department, and still other information is in customer service files. These are usually free-standing databases which no one shares with each other.

In order to get the huge increase in response rates, there needs to be sharing of inter-departmental data and the sharing of this information must come from the top of the organization. A lot of hard work, a paradigm shift in some instances, but a huge payoff in the end.


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