Best Practices For Digital Print Marketing

Whether you are a large or small marketer, digital printing has leveled the playing field in terms of the quality and sophistication of print. Whether it’s a one-off run or a run in the tens of thousands, digital presses (toner and inkjet) have transformed the cost-efficiencies of print production and marketing. But equally important are the changes this technology has enabled in the business and marketing models of the companies that use it.

These changes are made possible not just because marketers can print high-quality, four (plus) color jobs in short runs economically, although that’s part of it. It’s because other, ancillary technology advances have brought even the most sophisticated print marketing applications, such as personalized URLs, 1:1 personalization, and Web-based, centralized brand and document management, into the range of smaller budgets.

In a nutshell, digital printing is changing the way marketers and service providers think about marketing.
Just think about one benefit of digital production, the impact of being able to personalize or print in very short runs economically. Just this one capability alone allows you to . . .

• More closely target your customers. 
• Personalize each direct mailer, targeting your customers or prospects based on information you know about them. 
• Use customer profiles and smart segmentation to send out more marketing “touches” to key customer segments with the same marketing budget. 
• Do more market testing. 
• Respond to customer inquiries for collateral materials more quickly, even within 24 hours. 
• Develop entirely new products and services based around the capabilities of these presses. 

That’s just the start of what moving into a digital production environment can do.

Best practices for digital printing

Taking advantage of the opportunities provided by digital printing requires thinking beyond production, however, into the world of marketing. If you are incorporating digital print into your marketing mix, here are some basic “critical success factors” you want to keep in mind.

1. Change document management and marketing models, not just production technology. 

Digital printing may give you more flexibility to do things like print in four-color at the same cost or print smaller volumes at a time, but if that’s the only way you capitalize on this technology, you are missing the point. Digital printing—and, more accurately, the applications it is capable of producing—is capable of revolutionizing the way you approach marketing and document production and management. That doesn’t happen merely by incorporating more color or saving money on document costs.

Take the example of Villanova University. Before implementing a digital, print-on-demand workflow, students and professors submitted jobs manually, and it often took a full day for jobs to be produced. To increase efficiency and drive down costs, Villanova’s Graphic Services department implemented an automated Web-driven fulfillment system for submission of jobs. In just the first two years alone, overall revenue for the department increased by 18% annually, and by reducing the number of people touching the job from 4–5 people to 2–3 people, cost per copy dropped significantly through lowered labor costs.

This is just one example, but it illustrates the larger message of digital printing. The idea isn’t just to change how you print. It’s how to use the technology to change your marketing or how you do business.

2. Think holistically — combine applications.

The greatest gains in digital print are typically made when combining applications to create a larger workflow and document management solution. Many case studies are difficult to classify by application type because they combine multiple elements, such as print on demand, versioning, personalization, and Web fulfillment.

Consider the success of Zions Bank. When it wanted to increase business and build relationships with premier prospects, it developed a multi-tiered campaign designed to achieve the broader marketing goal. It created a series of three packages over a 10-week period. Each package contained a carefully crafted sales letter, a pre-filled reply card, and a gift. By combining the entire campaign into a single, comprehensive solution, it was able to reduce the number of layouts in production from literally hundreds to only fifteen, slash production time over traditional mail merge, and achieve postal savings of more than $15,000 due to co-mingling. Oh yes, 60% of prospects also called to set up appointments, so bank business increased by several million dollars!

This example illustrates that the key isn’t on the application itself. It’s how multiple technologies (including those beyond the press) are often used to form a larger, more comprehensive solution.

3. Think beyond “flat.”

With the advances in scoring, coating, and other finishing technologies, digital print output is increasingly dimensional. Mailers and event promoters, in particular, should pay attention to the exploding array of formats available for kits, packages, and promotional mailings. Digital isn’t flat anymore.

Look at Red Paper Plane, a company that specializes in short-run digital mailers. Its business was built on the ability to offering a variety of pop-up cubes and other three-dimensional shapes that expand out, fold out, and explode open. By using toner-based production, it can offer runs as short as 250, which would be prohibitively expensive in the offset world.

4. On complex jobs, work backwards.

There have been significant advances in the ability of PSPs to handle complex data workflows, offer cross-platform color management, and offer specialty binding and finishing on fast turnarounds. But it’s still smart practice to start with the most complex or demanding component first. Then build the rest of the design around them. You don’t want to design a complex, visually compelling marketing piece, then find out too late that the folds, the scoring, or the binding is problematic in a digital production environment.

For example, toner is less flexible than ink, so “reverse engineering” is particularly important when folding and scoring are involved. Grain direction is critical to prevent cracking across the fold, so you want to ensure that the project is designed so that, once the project is scored or folded, the orientation of the grain will be correct.

5. Understand how to design for digital.

Optimizing for digital press output may also benefit from pre-planning in graphic design, as well. Different presses offer different selections of papers on which they can optimally print. Some can output spot colors, but not all.

Some gradients can still be challenging to produce. Digital output can be coated and laminated, but the ease of doing so will vary based on the type of press. Most digital presses cannot print true metallics, although they can be simulated very closely.

Digital production has tremendous benefits, but there are adjustments that designers may want to make to optimize the results. Show your design to your service provider before submiting the job and ask if there are any tweaks that can be made to help the job be its absolute best.

6. Focus on relevant metrics, not per-unit costs.

When evaluating digital print applications, one of the biggest mistakes that marketers can make is thinking about the initial outlay and not the bottom-line growth. Unless they are looking at something like dimensional mailings in short runs (where pricing is vastly below what can be producing using offset), some marketers may still balk at the per-unit costs of digital compared to offset.

It sounds counter-intuitive to spend more on a per-piece basis and still end up increasing your margins, but it happens all the time. One specialty dental practice, the office of Dr. Mark Wilhelm, sent out two waves of personalized mailings to 468 general practice dentists to encourage referrals. Although the personalized mailings cost more than traditional static mailings, the program was a huge success. Why? Because every dentist who refers a patient to Dr. Wilhelm’s practice represents an average of $20,000 in revenue. With a 68% conversion rate of dentists joining his “study club” (thereby establishing Dr. Wilhelm as an expert in his field and keeping him top of mind), the campaign was tremendously profitable!

When it comes to digital print, the true impact can only be evaluated by looking at your business holistically and understanding how, once all costs are taken into account, any given campaign impacts your bottom line.

7. Utilize the benefits of multi-touch and multi-channel.

Remember the old fable about trying to break one stick versus breaking a bundle of bound sticks? The same concept applies to multi-touch and multi-channel marketing. Programs that use multiple touches through multiple channels to reinforce a message are generally stronger (even those using personalized printing or other targeting marketing approaches) than programs that rely on a single channel alone.

In fact, in a survey of 416 marketers, InfoTrends found that very few were doing single-channel marketing campaigns anymore. When asked the average number of media types used in a direct marketing campaign, marketers said . . .

• One channel — 8.1%
• Two channels — 30.5%
• Three channels — 38.0%
• Four or more — 15.1%

Common forms of easily implementable multichannel marketing include direct mail with follow-up emails or text messaging. Or mailers that drive respondents to personalized URLs, where they can provide more information on themselves, respond to surveys, and access incentives. Or campaigns in which print pieces include QR Codes, social media invitations, or “text back” responses.

API Marketing (formerly Auburn Printers & Integrated Marketing) has been listening closely to the benefits of multi-channel marketing. When it went through a year-long campaign to rebrand itself from a printing company to a marketing firm, it developed a multi-phase campaign that incorporated direct mail with personalized URLs, social media, email, press releases, newspaper ads with QR Codes, and much more. In general, we might expect a good, well-designed personalized, multi-channel campaign to see response rates from 10-30%. This campaign achieved an eye-popping 56% direct mail response rate alone.

We are just starting to scratch the surface of how multi-channel marketing can use complementary media to boost the effectiveness of a message.

8. Evaluate costs differently.

Even with the potential for much higher returns, some marketers may balk at the upfront costs of some digital printing applications. However, well-executed digital printing campaigns can cost less on a per-project basis than traditional applications because they are often based on smaller, more targeted mailings or take advantage of cost-efficiencies and amortization inherent in the digital workflow. To evaluate true success, you need to look at metrics such as response rate, conversion rate, cost per lead, dollars per sale, and ROI.

One marketer recently achieved ROI of 80:1 when it began creating personalized follow-up brochures to prevent cancellations once families and individuals made reservations at its high-end resorts. The brochures detailed the purchaser’s travel plans, provided photos and itineraries for their actual visit, and were mailed out with 48 hours. Were the brochures costly? Sure, probably $1.00 to $2.00 apiece. But the program vastly reduced cancellations, which sent the program’s ROI through the roof.

These methods of evaluation are not natural to many companies focused so heavily on cost per piece, but the more they begin to understand metrics like conversions rates, dollars per sale, and ROI, the more they can accurately evaluate the true bottom-line costs and benefits of today’s fastest growing and most powerful print applications.

9. Make a long-term commitment.

The marketers who gain the deepest benefits from digital print-driven campaigns are those who have a philosophical commitment to them. They see themselves as making a shift in marketing and document management model that goes beyond a single or even a series of campaigns. The deeper your commitment to this approach, the more you will benefit from it.

Keep in mind that sometimes the benefits of digital-printing-driven applications are felt right away. Other times, they are accrued over time. Avoid the temptation to evaluate the value of digital print campaigns on a short-term basis. Instead, use the flexibility offered by digital production to test, refine, and optimize programs.