Print Personalization: What is it and does it work?

Post written by Kat McDaniel, Chief Innovator at MEDiAHEAD | Marketing Portal Guru | Variable Data Promoter | Analytics Advocate | Explorer

We are seeing 1:1 printing or “print personalization” more and more places these days.

Direct mail.

Follow-up marketing collateral.

Information kits.

What’s the real deal with these applications? Do they really live up to the hype? Or is personalization just a gimmick to get marketers to buy more print?

Consider the way you’re being marketed to:

When you shop online, cookies follow your every move so that page views can be customized to your preferences and purchase patterns.

At the grocery store, your receipt is printed with coupons based on the items you put into your bag.

When you receive mail from your investment broker, it contains information only on those funds you have invested in or that are relevant to you.

Personalization has become so ingrained in our consumer experience that we barely realize it anymore.

It’s not a gimmick. It’s what customers expect.

What about cost? Isn’t personalization a high-cost luxury?

On the contrary, when handled properly, the opposite is true.

1:1 printing optimizes your marketing investment by not mailing irrelevant information to the wrong people. It makes every record count.

Properly tracked, 1:1 printing provides provable ROI, so you can compare its value against other marketing methods and justify your spending based on real numbers.

By focusing on specific customer segments and generating higher response rates and per-order values from those customers, you can spend less on print and bring in more revenue.

More relevant communications (newsletters, bills and other correspondence) increase customer retention and provide a benefit difficult to quantify yet with real bottom-line benefits.

From this perspective, 1:1 printing seems less like a luxury and more like a business necessity!