insights.
Jul 27th
According to new research by Aberdeen Group, Print On-Demand (also called POD, web-to-print or print automation) provides a dramatic improvement in customer retention and ROMI (Return on Marketing Investments). As an underwriter of Aberdeen’s research, we’re pleased to provide exclusive access to their findings.
From research by Aberdeen Group: Users of Print On-Demand achieved a 42% higher customer retention rate than non-users.
Among their findings was a correlation between companies that use a Print On-Demand solution and a dramatic improvement in customer retention. In an economy where every customer counts, a 42% higher customer retention rate among Print On-Demand users is more than noteworthy. But what’s the correlation? How does POD impact on customer retention so significantly?
Follow this link to download a free report including additional findings from Aberdeen: Print On-Demand: Driving Efficiency and Revenue Growth with Organizational Print Portals.
Many times when a company moves to a Print On-Demand or web-to-print solution, another significant shift happens. They move from static off-set printing to digital printing. Several years ago many marketing professionals questioned the quality of digital print. Today, to the naked eye, it is practically impossible to tell the difference between commercial off-set printing and digital.
Using advanced digital printing and marketing automation technology, the delivery of printed materials becomes as easy as sending personalized, triggered email. In fact, the use of both mail and email together becomes fast, efficient and very impactful.
Many companies have found it helpful to integrate their Marketing Asset Management solution with email and automated print deployment, making the creation and execution processes streamlined and efficient. In fact, in addition to improved customer retention, many companies save hundreds of thousands of dollars by moving to an integrated POD system. (See case studies at www.mailprint.com)
Thanks to the Aberdeen Group for investing in the research that quantifies what was previously suspected: POD improves customer retention and bolsters ROMI by putting a serious dent in marketing execution costs.
Jun 22nd
Managing the marketing needs of over 800 locations is no small task. Ferrellgas has done an excellent job of it, driving revenue and results on a local level. Last year they realized that they could improve their localized marketing and make their personnel more efficient with a marketing communications portal (to some of you, this means Marketing Asset Management, Marketing or Print Automation, or Web to Print.)
The effort to consolidate vendors, learn a new process, or simply loading a platform with the multitude of marketing materials and assets can be daunting. Although some companies become intimidated by the initial work it takes to launch a Marketing Communications Portal, Ferrellgas never batted an eyelash and tackled it head-on.
Today Ferrellgas can give you 80,000 reasons why that implementation process is well worth it. They will save at least $80,000 in their first year of using Mail Print’s marketing communications portal and were recently featured in Aberdeen’s report “Marketing Asset Management, Managing Brand Compliance in Distributed Marketing Environments.” The results have been everything they expected and more.
“It was an immediate, overnight turnaround, with far shorter production times, less repetitive effort, and more consultation and guidance being provided to the field offices,” said Brian Mater, Marketing Manager at Ferrellgas.
If you’d like to read more of the Ferrellgas story, check out our online Ferrellgas case study.
Jun 7th
Providing too many options in a marketing asset management solution may create a decision process that is too intense and complicated.
Years ago, Columbia professor, Sheena Ivengar ran an interesting consumer test. She set up a “free samples” table in a super market and proceeded to test the difference between sampling 6 jellies Vs. sampling 24 jellies. The net result: when 6 jellies were presented, 40% of the shoppers stopped to sample, and 30% bought jelly. While 60% of the shoppers stopped to sample from the 24 choices and only 3% actually bought jelly.
So we like the shopping experience, but struggle to make a decision when faced with too many options. I buy that.
Users of marketing asset management systems are frequently distributed sales forces, marketing departments, franchises, retailers or local stores. They use these systems to download logos and ads, and create brand-controlled, yet customizable marketing materials.
Having many options creates a great “shopping” experience and initial usage, but if too many customization options are given, over time the users may become stressed by the system. This results in fewer ads being downloaded, fewer email and direct mail campaigns being initiated, and ultimately a decrease in the amount of marketing done by your users or locations. Even worse, they may instead go outside the approved system and create materials that are not within branding standards. All this can happen simply because designing or creating the marketing materials is a taxing decision process.
When this logic is applied to companies who utilize an online ordering application for marketing asset management and marketing automation, a hypothesis begins to form:
When it is important that users repeatedly use an asset management system, having too many options decreases the frequency with which they use the system.
At this moment I have no facts to prove this hypothesis, but it is something I have witnessed for the past six years working with our communications portal. I am not hopeful that I can convince a client to perform a test and actually share the results as this is not a measurement that marketing departments are interested in proving out. So for now, we just have to be wise marketers and consider the decision process of the user when establishing how many “jellies”, asset or options are the right amount for an online marketing asset management system. And by all means, if usage of your asset management system is declining, consider testing the number of assets and options you provide your users. You may find that less is more.
May 6th
Staying in contact with your prospects and customers is key for building and maintaining revenue. However, it can also be an ongoing challenge and resource-draw for your sales and marketing teams. Check out the video below (or here) to learn how businesses are using Mail Print’s multi-channel marketing automation system to transform their lead nurturing and customer retention into automated, repeatable processes.
Apr 8th
Searching for the right words to describe the marketing automation, management, or execution systems you're looking for? Maybe we can help.
Marketing Asset Management. Print Automation. Marketing Automation. Communications Portals. Distributed Marketing. Web-To-Print. Confused yet?
Wouldn’t it be nice if everything fit in a nice, neat package that is easy to understand and explain? In the world of marketing communications management, many people would think the above terms all mean the same thing. I actually think they don’t. I think there are so many terms because each means something a little different:
Focuses on creating an online library of digital marketing assets such as logos, templates, stock photography, videos and radio ads for use by centralized marketing staff or a network of remote users.
A term coined to define organizations that have many local markets that are marketed to differently, whether marketing strategy and execution is controlled by a central marketing department or the local stores and locations.
The ability to order printed materials through an online printing management system. Typically, this reduces a company’s inventory waste and improves the customization available on the printed pieces.
A central repository for ordering and downloading all types of marketing communications and assets, including email, logos, direct mail, radio commercials, fliers, buck slips, etc. Marketing Communications Portals are very useful for distributed marketing organizations.
Eliminates human intervention in creating printed pieces. This could be obtained via a web-to-print application or communications portal that also employs print automation, or could be a standalone system that creates printed pieces automatically based upon data streams and live data feeds.
The process of triggering marketing communications to a specific individual or audience segment without human intervention. This differs from print automation in that the automated marketing campaigns could include email, direct mail and other channels, by themselves or combined.
I’m sure there are many more terms and buzz words that I haven’t noted here. Just like any rapidly advancing technology solution, new terms are created every day. The most important thing to understand is what you really need in a solution, regardless of what it is called.
Apr 1st
Interested in continually improving your direct marketing results? Avoid a common database and direct marketing pitfall by devoting the time needed to document your strategies and techniques.
In the past two weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with a couple of fellow direct marketers. One is a prospective client, considering the use of variable data printing for the first time. The other is a long-time friend who needs help getting a better ROI on his direct mail and email campaigns. Both have worked in online, database or direct marketing for many years, and both have large enough budgets to really drive revenue.
Ironically, both have the same, simple problem: somewhere along the way, the “doing more with less” mantra meant the elimination of documentation. So now one has a great strategic plan (and it is documented), but failed to log all of the results over time. The other had a great testing plan, but didn’t document it, and six months later can’t remember the details regarding the target audiences.
Some of you may think this could never happen to you. I challenge you to think back to a time when your plan (and I know it was the most stellar, innovative, revenue-producing plan ever written) was modified beyond recognition by the time it got through your boss, your boss’s boss, the client, legal, compliance and the ten other stakeholders. Did you change the plan to reflect all the final decisions?
As direct and database marketing become more intricate and complex, it is impossible to remember all the detailed changes that take place over the course of the strategic planning process. If you don’t know what you did or how it worked, where does this leave you? Back at the beginning. Database and direct marketing is an iterative, building process. So no matter how frazzled, busy and stretched your marketing department becomes, don’t shortcut the documentation process and make a ginormous mistake. You’ll thank yourself for knowing exactly what you did, why you did it, and the resulting outcomes.
Ginormous as defined by Merriam Webster’s online dictionary:
Pronunciation: \jī-ˈnȯr-məs\
Function: adjective
Etymology: gigantic + enormous
Date: circa 1948
extremely large : humongous
Mar 24th
Just like milk and cookies, direct mail and email are better together.
Email is, by far, the best thing to ever hit direct marketing.
One of the newest ways we are helping our clients manage their direct communications is by helping them develop automated systems to use direct mail strategically in conjunction with email campaigns. Let me share some of the innovative ways our clients are approaching the mail/email equation:
We recently developed an automated system that generates a postcard the day after a hard bounced email. This allows our client to have their customers easily update their email addresses as soon as the old email address is no longer valid. The real beauty of this is that it is fully automated. No one has to pull a list from the Email Service Provider and send it to us. It just happens.
If a long-term customer opts-out of your email communications, what does that mean?
Our client just asks by mailing a survey after someone opts-out, allowing them to address unforeseen issues and quickly win back the appropriate customers.
Several of our clients are having success by using both email and mail in conjunction with PURLs (personalized URL), as both a way to invite their audience members to visit their personalized web sites, and to follow up with respondents to thank them for visiting and drive their next action.
This may seem simple, but one of our client’s retention marketing efforts simply consists of mailing or emailing the same information, but if they have opted in to email, they get email. If they don’t have a valid email address or if they haven’t opted in to email, they get the information mailed to them. Simple, but it works.
One of our associates recently attended Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Summit in Miami. Many of the attendees wondered why a company like Mail Print would attend such an event. They thought a company named “Mail Print” would perceive email as “the enemy.” Far from it. We were probably more successful at this event than the email companies… because we get it. Our clients need more than one successful marketing tactic to drive the revenue they need to propel their companies through this recession. And, oh boy, the magic we can make by strategically planning to use the right medium for our audiences.
Mail has not died. It just has a new BFF… email.
Mar 18th
Academically speaking, the customer life cycle begins with a prospect: an interested party who may potentially need your product or service. Adept companies qualify their prospects to pinpoint their sales efforts on leads that are ready to buy, while using automated marketing tactics such as email campaigns and direct mail programs to continue to develop leads at the beginning of the buying process. Following a first purchase, a period of customer assimilation or on-boarding takes place. This is a prime time to start building loyalty and influencing ongoing purchases. Particularly adroit companies employ retention programs to continue to provide value and to educate their customers to improve cross-selling opportunities. The final frontier recognizes when a customer’s attention has waned, and alerts sales and marketing to deploy a winback strategy.
While everyone knows that it costs 6-10 times more to acquire a new customer than to maintain a loyal customer, most direct marketing is heavily weighted toward lead generation and lead nurturing. Responsibility for improving the customer experience is largely a reactive tactic left to the sales and customer service departments, which usually means trying to appease a customer after they have become dissatisfied and have a complaint.
So what’s a smart marketer to do? Take a moment to evaluate your customer life cycle in comparison to your direct marketing efforts. Where can your marketing dollars most impact revenue? Creating a chart like the one below can be helpful in identifying where spending and effort need to shift. And why not consider using some of those marketing automation techniques to trigger communications to current and lapsed customers?
Example customer lifecycle with poorly-aligned direct marketing resources.
Feb 15th
Loving reduced inventory costs: On-demand printing systems allow you to quickly and easily manage printed products and mailings via an online interface.
In industries where physical products are sold, a number that is critically analyzed is inventory turnover. Without going into a long calculation, this number illustrates the company’s good or poor management of inventory. It can highlight that too much inventory is in stock, causing high carrying costs and poor use of cash, or it can show that too little inventory is being held, causing shortages and lost revenue.
Recently while attending a client review meeting, I witnessed how this client applies inventory turnover to using an on-demand printing platform. Being a numbers person myself, I was immediately intrigued. (Just so you know, an “on-demand printing,” “web-to-print” or “marketing communications portal” solution basically allows easy, speedy, online ordering of printed products like stationery, forms, labels, envelopes, postcards, business cards, etc. For more info you can see a demo of our solution.
Not to mention the thousands of dollars they are saving by streamlined invoicing and ordering processes. They are “virtually” in love with on-demand printing. Yes, they pay a little more per printed piece, but probably not as much as you think. And yes, they know exactly what they are saving using this solution, although they weren’t willing to share the numbers with me. Hmmm… I wonder if I’m not charging them enough?
Jan 25th
Automated marketing campaigns. Flexible customization options. API integrations. It turns out that conveying the benefits and features of a marketing communications portal is difficult without some visuals. So, we created a video about our solution for marketing campaign management, digital asset management, local store marketing and printing management. Critiques welcome….