Why Enhanced Direct Mail is Critical to Success

According to the 2020 ‘Email Benchmarking Report’ from the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), B2B emails have an average open rate of 20.8%, while B2C messages average 21.9%. In contrast, direct mail is opened by 66% of recipients and has an impressive 322% ROI. There’s no doubt that the value of the printed word is indisputable so how will your commercial print operation capitalise?

The Case for Marketing Personalisation

Even for the modern user, printed documents convey intrinsic value in the sense that the sender has invested in the recipient. By demonstrating to your clients that you can tailor the content to the audience based on almost unlimited metrics, you can deliver results they can take to the bank. This is Enhanced Direct Mail. It works.

Marketing personalisation is so much more than adding the recipient’s name, it’s about creating such relevance they can’t resist engaging with the brand. With two versatile software platforms working in harmony, you can vary the name, imagery, language, text, web links and more. You can even feed this data through to the client’s website, creating a personalised shopping experience.

Your goal is to focus on what you do best: print! Now enhance your service offering by managing the personalisation element effortlessly. Achieve this with XMPie or Infigo Catfish and embrace the intelligent automation of your printing process with Xerox FreeFlow Core. It’s a powerful combination.

Creating a Recurring Campaign

With these tools, you set up the job once. As part of a recurring campaign for your clients, your pre-press labour is minimised, and both your margins and client retention rates grow. That’s commercial good sense. Now let’s show your clients XMPie Circle. Watch the video and see how you create a ‘digital storyboard‘ for 1:1 personalised multichannel marketing campaigns! It’s a natural progression, and precisely how your competitors are lifting themselves above print as a mere commodity.

As of this year, Millennials and Generation-Z are the UK’s dominant demographic and, to be effective, the printed communications you produce are best delivered as part of a structured campaign. So how might your client’s marketing campaign now be designed?

Examples of Personalisation

Let’s suppose your client is a car dealership, and as visitors come to their site, the salespeople collect their email address, and some basic details of the sort of vehicle they aspire to purchase. This could trigger a personalised email emphasising the models they might consider, but in the client’s preferred colours.

Any subsequent printed brochure sent by post, could then include the imagery most pertinent to the customer: now just blue vehicles, but images which reflect their buying personas: the young man in his twenties will react better to sporty images, vs. the young family who will be more reassured by capacity and safety features.

The Multichannel Personalisation Software Advantage

To assemble all of the many criteria manually would be prohibitively time consuming, and yet with multichannel personalisation software packages such as Xerox XMPie and Infigo Catfish, the execution is fully automated. Best of all, it can be profitable to deliver these experiences on-the-fly: just run the job, send to the printer, and it’s done.

We’re not done, though! When this targeted audience visits your client’s website, even here, the webpages they see, are customised with equal consideration.  Automatically. As any marketing professional will tell you, modern marketing isn’t about mere volume, it’s about conversions. Knowing your customer, and presenting to them the personalised customer journey, is the single most effective way to maximise sales. Best of all, it’s now fully quantifiable, and the statistics are there to prove the results.

Conclusion

So now you understand how enhanced direct mail adds value to your clients. Imagine how prospective print buyers can perceive your commercial print operation as being far more capable, and valuable, versus your competition who can discuss only print volumes.

Advanced UK are ready to help you prepare, so you will be ready to lift your client’s messaging above the marketing noise.  We call that a patch to success.