One-to-One Marketing

The average American’s trip to the mailbox isn’t as impersonal as it once was. It’s no longer status-quo to get mail addressed to “occupant.” Direct mailers have long been in tune with the benefits of one-to-one marketing, and some catalogers are following suit.

Victoria’s Secret is versioning mailings to best suit customers. For example, the company monitors buying habits, and when a customer hasn’t bought in a set amount of time, she gets a catalog version that offers discounts.

Other catalogers use their front and/or back covers to send personalized messages to customers, while still others produce titles with versioned inserts that introduce new products, promote the company’s Web site or prompt customers to visit a local retail store.

Indeed, one-to-one marketing has changed the consumer’s mail experience and continues to shape buying habits. If it’s done right, one-to-one marketing can pay off in exponential dividends, says Ted Gaillard, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Vertis Direct Marketing Services. His company provides marketing and advertising solutions to more than 3,000 clients. “Two things are hurting the business,” Gaillard says. “The cost of prospecting is rising, and response rates have been on the decline.”

But these trends can be reversed with the right care built into a one-to-one marketing campaign, he notes — one that’s built on driving data and the right offer to the customer.

Digital Printing: The Direct-mail Enabler

One of the key enablers for direct mailers latching on more quickly to variable-data printing was the premiere of digital color production presses. These solutions caught on quickly in the direct-mail segment. They offered good color quality, significantly reduced makereadies, a totally digital workflow and the ability to efficiently produce shorter runs — down to a single-piece output, in some cases.

“[At Vertis,] we’re seeing a heavy degree of digital one-to-one printing,” Gaillard reports. “Although it’s been around for years, the technology was ahead of the market. Databases didn’t have the level of sophistication to interface with the digital print engines.” The industry is overcoming these challenges, Gaillard notes. “Print engines are just one part of the story. [The success stems from] creating the link between the database and the print engines and the expertise of the individuals managing the data.”

Despite the direct-mail industry’s broadening interest in digital color printing, concerns remain about cost versus revenue. “There’s no conclusive proof that color personalization beyond statement printing pays for itself in the long run with sustained use,” says Joe Webb, a former consultant and owner of TrendWatch. “Studies show price offers and similar incentives offer virtually the same results as full-color personalization for less total cost. Can it increase the perceived value of a statement from, say, a brokerage firm? Sure. Does it make people want to invest more? No.”

Those who design campaigns such as direct mail and catalogs have a “big bag of tricks to pull from to stimulate response,” Webb adds. “Personalized color printing is just one thing in that bag. For color personalization to impact the market as a growth area, it has to get out of the occasional mode and into mainstream mode.”

It’s All About the Database

A little research unveils a plethora of one-to-one marketing success stories in the direct mail segment of the print industry, but what about catalogs? And are there lessons to be learned from the direct mailers who paved the way to personalization?

The most significant inhibitor to the catalog industry’s quick adoption of one-to-one marketing has been deficiencies in the manufacturing process, says Gaillard. Bindery technologies were built for economy and high rates of speed, but when variable-data processes are factored into the manufacturing line, things begin to slow — and it becomes less efficient for printers, and more expensive for catalogers, to print.

Since it’s unlikely that L.L. Bean’s or Lillian Vernon’s numerous titles will be printed on a digital production press anytime soon (long-run-length catalogs would be too costly to consider for now), offset printers and their catalog partners are looking to proven pressroom and finishing technologies to do the variable-data work.

To be sure, personalization isn’t a new opportunity for catalogers. They’ve been practicing it for many moons — ink-jetting offers on covers, recipient addressing and tracking data. But database-integration technologies and manufacturing tools have matured to enable catalogers to think beyond the white label box and take full advantage of one-to-one campaigns. This is just what one cataloger has done.

Lords of the Library

Gaylord Bros. is the one-stop catalog shop for all things library. The company distributes items ranging from furniture and shelving to A/V equipment and archival supplies. Its customer list ranges from large institutions to individual buyers preserving a family Bible.

This year the company will mail 1.2 million catalogs in 14 editions. Each edition will include some degree of customer personalization. “[Personalization] allows us to perceive and react to each customer as an individual,” says Brian Shenker, vice president of database marketing and e-commerce at Gaylord Bros. “Take the institutions with which we have contracts. We may personalize a message for them that emphasizes their user contract number and explains what their contract entitles them to. At the other extreme, we may have a customer who has a small camera shop and wants to preserve a few photos. Maybe he has bought from us only once before. … We may entice him with a highly targeted message about a special offer.”

Gaylord Bros.’ annual reference catalog (see pg. 33) is produced and distributed in December and mailed to about 114,000 recipients. The most recent version boasted 720 pages plus a four-page cover. The body was printed on a 38-lb, No.4 coated stock, while the cover was produced on a sturdy 138-lb coated stock. The book’s body was printed four-color, while the four-page cover was printed with six inks, finished off with a spot UV coating and perfect-bound with a new hinge glue.

According to Gregg Thompson, the Brown Printing sales rep assigned to the Gaylord account: “This catalog uses ink-jet technology to produce more than 500 messages of address-specific offerings. It used six lines of TrueType font messages plus separate ink-jet lines to show sale prices. It also had an eight-line address with codes and account numbers, all in different fonts and correlating to the message, sale price and group discount.”

Shenker says although Gaylord Bros. practices in a relatively small market, simple address databasing can be tricky: “Many of our customers work in the federal government or universities, and their addresses can be complicated.” The software that’s available to clean up addresses can prove inadequate in this case, he says. Rather than rely on software tools to clean its database, Gaylord Bros. takes a manual approach: Everyone on the Gaylord team takes ownership for the integrity of its information. “It’s the responsibility of anyone who has any contact with the customer to populate and update the database with information on the customer that extends beyond a bill-to or ship-to address,” he explains.

Working with a clean database smoothes the manufacturing process. “We have a standard export procedure we do whenever we’re getting ready to lay out a catalog,” Shenker says. “We can export reports of what we consider to be all the possible variables for each customer — variables that should enter our thinking when we’re determining whom to send catalogs to and what messages they’ll receive.”

All of the variables are ranked, and the company starts with the strongest variable and works from there. “Some of the variables override others,” Shenker explains. “For example, if we have a customer who continually uses their contract, and they’ve been a customer for more than 10 years, we’re going to reinforce the message that using their contract is beneficial to them. It doesn’t make sense to send a message to a very large customer who orders often that he can take $10 off his order of $50 or more. But to a small business, a message like this may be a good incentive.”

Once the one-to-one-marketing goals are established and the team is clear on the messages to send (for this year’s annual catalog, there were nearly 500 messages that could appear), they download a flat, ASCII comma-delimited file that’s sent to Brown Printing, where the cover messages are printed on the polybagging line using VideoJet SR50 ink-jetting heads.

In the final tally, how does Shenker rate Gaylord’s success with one-to-one marketing? “The results are mixed. In some cases, we’ve seen our contractual customers respond very well to the custom messages about their contracts, but in other cases, we get weak responses.

“But everything we do is a work-in-progress, a learning experience. As long as we’re continually measuring what’s working and moving away from what’s not, we’re moving in the right direction.”

Gretchen Kirby Peck is president and chief creative officer of P.A.G.E.s, an editorial consultancy and freelance writing firm specializing in graphic arts.