With direct marketers coming under increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprint and stop bombarding consumers with poorly targeted, irrelevant junk mail, digital print is experiencing a growth in popularity.
Digital print, which provides highly personalised mailings based on the data held by brands on customers and prospects, is a technology that sits well in these eco-conscious times. Not only does it enable a brand to target different segments of its database with relevant offers, it also demonstrates to the recipient that the sender has tailored its communications based on previous shopping behaviour.
To do all this, of course, the brand needs data on the mail-shots' recipients. But how does an organisation ensure that its data is fit for digital print?
Matthew Diamond, managing director of Lorien Unique Direct, argues that print, digital or otherwise, is merely a delivery mechanism for relevant messages. The analytics that go into achieving this relevance could equally result in a piece of communication via email, SMS or the web, he says.
For Diamond, the business objective is the starting point for data in digital print. "You have to understand what the business issues are and what you are trying to achieve, whether it's acquisition, retention or churn reduction," he explains. "If it's retention, you may look to profile your existing data to understand why people previously left and therefore who may be susceptible to leave in the future. It is never just about putting someone's name on a piece of paper."
Perhaps not, but the recipient's name, especially its accuracy, remains an important factor. "If you're going to send someone something with their name picked out, it has to be accurate," says Malcolm Webb, marketing director at digital printer DSTi Output. "You would be surprised at the shortcuts people take with lists when they are trying to knock something out cheaply."
If data hygiene is vital for any piece of DM, it is particularly important if digital print is used to do something clever with a name. Showing the recipient's name written in sand or clouds on a mailpack may invite derision from some sections of the digital print business, but it remains a popular technique. As Chris Arthur, managing director of Perspektiv Marketing Group, points out: "If a person's name is spelt incorrectly, it looks 10 times worse when iced on a cake".
Brands with up-to-date transactional data on their customers are in the best position to maximise the benefits of digital print. Andy Ruddle, co-founder and sales and marketing director of Real Digital, cites a recent campaign for Thomson Holidays, in which the mailpack had 823 million variables, including brands, offers, photographs of hotels, dates and other data.
"It sounds mind-boggling at first, but Thomson knows the last time each customer booked a holiday, what type of holiday it was, the amount spent and whether or not children were present - so you can see how the different profiles can be created," says Ruddle. "There is a lot of versioning with digital print, but the real benefit is when you get to this level of one-to-one personalisation."
Up close and personal
So when a brand has the right data, it can make its mailings much more relevant. Inc Direct works with brands including The Carphone Warehouse and Travelbag, and in both instances can draw on recently updated data to personalise mailpacks. For The Carphone Warehouse, Inc Direct bases its targeting on each customer's network, tariff and handset model; when someone books a flight to a particular location via Travelbag, Inc Direct can target him with relevant offers for hotels, car hire and local attractions.
Inc Direct MD Noel Warner notes that even where there is not such a wealth of data, there remains much that can be done. "Sometimes the information a company has on a customer may not be in a database accessible by the marketing team. In these instances, the brand can still do some clever stuff by targeting segments rather than individual consumers," he says.
For example, a travel firm may know which customers have taken a skiing holiday and which a city break, but not the exact resorts or cities visited. Based on the data they can access, the company can target the skier segment with skiing holidays and the city-break segment with city breaks.
DSTi's Webb agrees that even such relatively simple segmentation can make a campaign much more relevant, and deliver a tremendous uplift in response rates. "I think it's better not to over-complicate things," he says. "By all means build a database with plenty of up-to-date information, but don't mine it too deeply. The temptation is to create a million segments for a million people with a million messages just because you can, but I don't see the value in that."
Filling the gaps
In some instances, planning a digital print campaign can spur a brand to reassess the nature of the data it holds on its customers, and take steps to improve it. Just as many brands have only woken up to the value of collecting email addresses in recent years, they are beginning to realise that if they want to segment a customer database, they need to fill the gaps in it.
"Entering digital print is a good way of seeing what variables you have on the database," says Amanda Ling, associate director of data intelligence at data specialist Response One. "It makes you look at where you are and implement data collection strategies to put you in a position where you can do (better) in the future. Digital print may highlight the fact that data-capture or registration forms on the website are not collecting all the information you need to run a good digital print campaign."
Ling adds that one of her agency's clients is currently going through this process, redesigning its registration cards to capture more of the data it needs to profile and segment its database. "This is not an easy thing to do because these cards are in all the client's products, but it will reap the benefits in due course," says Ling.
According to Real Digital's Ruddle, another important aspect of successful digital print is teamwork and collaboration. He points out that a highly variable digital print campaign creates extra stakeholders, including affinity partners, technical and data partners, and legal advisers. He says this is because most brands do not usually engage with digital print.
Clients and their agencies need hand-holding in the early days, according to Ruddle. "We hold discussions, presentations and workshops for clients' data departments and design studios to help them understand what is required. It's not complicated, but we need to reassure them of this."
The good news, Ruddle adds, is that once they have run their first campaign, clients tend to be enthusiastic about digital print. "The best way is to start simple, test the process and let them get comfortable with it," he says. "Then, once they understand the process, the programme continues and the mailings become increasingly complex and sophisticated."
Or as complex and sophisticated, at least, as the collected data will permit.
POWER POINTS
- Digital print allows for many millions of variables in mailpacks
- A recent Thomson Holidays mailpack had 823 million variables
- Up-to-date data makes for more effective personalisation
DIGITAL PRINT - THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MYTHS
Myth 1: Client data is often not clean enough for digital print to work
Noel Warner, managing director, INC Direct:
"Clients' first reaction is often to say that the data they hold on their customers is not accurate or detailed enough to take advantage of the personalisation offered by digital print. This is usually wrong. Data accuracy can be tackled by cleansing the data and running it against the major suppression files.
"While the data may not be accurate enough to allow individual, one-to-one targeting, it is usually possible to target segments of the database with offers that are relevant to each segment."
Myth 2: Personalisation means just putting a name on a mailpack
Matthew Diamond, managing director, Lorien Unique Direct:
"The myth that causes the most problems is the idea that putting someone's name on something makes it personal. It doesn't. What makes it personal is the relevance of the entire message.
"Also, too many people do not appreciate the size of the opportunity to make every sheet of digital print totally different. Depending on the data matrix, you could have 30,000 different mailshots. People who shy away because of cost need to think about ROI. Is it better to send 100,000 items and get a 0.7 per cent response rate, or send 50,000 and get a four per cent response rate? It's about doing less better."
Myth 3: Digital print is fit only for best customers
Andy Ruddle, co-founder and sales and marketing director, Real Digital:
"Brands should not be using digital print just to talk to their top customers. It is affordable and feasible to talk to an entire database in this way, whether via direct mail, email or a statement.
"Digital production can link those communications, so there needs to be dialogue in the organisation to understand what is achievable, rather than what has been done in the past. Major brands such as Ikea and RBS are now routinely using digital print because it's working for them."
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