Company Profile: Serbin Print Marketing & Publishing

If you worked for a not-for-profit, would you turn to your printer for ideas about how to improve fund-raising campaigns? Likely, they wouldn’t be your first choice. This is the challenge faced by executives at Serbin Print Marketing & Publishing, a 45-year-old, Sarasota, FL-based firm that is transforming into a strategic marketing resource as well as a commercial printer.

To help turn the tide, Serbin put its “message into a bottle” -- delivered via the U.S. mail stream. The bottle was the opening teaser in a campaign to invite targeted customers and prospects in Serbin’s largest vertical market, not-forprofits, to an educational workshop on the latest techniques for donor and membership solicitation.

“The hardest thing we’ve encountered in making this transition is getting long-term customers who know you as a printer, to get to know and accept you as a marketing resource,” said president Mark Serbin.

This time the message was received. Fifty-five percent of recipients viewed the message’s personalized website (PURL) and 29 percent subsequently attended the event, filling the room. New business was generated, including four new jobs in the days following the event and many other promising engagements. Moreover, the effort is representative of the focused marketing that has helped Serbin build the newer, digital segment of its business, which drove the firm to 12 percent annual growth: its best financial results since the recession.

Becoming a Digital Marketer

Like many commercial printers, Serbin’s journey into marketing services began when it initiated digital printing. “When the economy tanked [around 2008], large offset runs really started declining, but digital
printing continued to grow,” Serbin recalled. “We could see that digital was our future, so that’s where we began putting most of our time and effort.”

The transition to digital is typically challenging because its effects ripple through nearly every facet of the business. Digital jobs tend to be shorter and more numerous than offset, so shops need to automate or risk losing profit margins.

The personalization that adds value requires new data expertise. Selling digital jobs requires the sales staff to adopt a new approach -- solutions selling -- to a new target of strategic marketers. Developing and marketing digital initiatives requires company leadership to build and communicate a compelling vision for the firm’s new direction.

Serbin took these challenges in stride. “I really think the digital transition has been easy for us,” he said. “I believe it’s because I wholeheartedly embraced digital when I saw it was a potentially strong growth area. And the second part of that equation is that we teamed up with Xerox, bringing their business development team on board for training on sales and vertical markets. They taught us that we need to market ourselves, and to practice what we preach with personalized mailings. It has opened a lot of doors for us. We’re able to go wider and deeper with our existing accounts and to introduce our brand into new markets.”

The approach has paid off. The offset business continued to decline for several years but stabilized in 2012 and grew a little in 2013. Combined with the ongoing growth of digital, in 2013 the $4-plus million company had its first double-digit growth since the recession and projects more of the same moving forward. Last year, overall sales rose a whopping 26 percent, Serbin reported, adding that "digital [print] was up nearly 73 percent while offset, which still represents the highest dollar volume, was up only 3.4 percent."

Serbin staged its first big event back in 2012, relying heavily on the Xerox business development team and Xerox ProfitAccelerator Digital Business Development Resources to produce an open house communicating the firm’s transformation. The firm also has run an ongoing series of smaller “lunch ‘n learn” sessions offering programs for targeted segments of Serbin’s customer and prospect base. After skipping a year intentionally, the firm's leader said another event is planned for October 2016: "Our emcee will be [sales and marketing strategist] Lois Ritarossi of Gimbel & Associates" out of Garden City, NY.

Reaching the Largest Vertical

Then two years ago Serbin sought to combine those two efforts, in effect, by staging its first large educational event for a target market, not-for-profits, which represents about 20 percent of its business. The goal was to run an educational program that showed Serbin to be a strategic marketing and communications company that is a significant resource of campaign ideas and solutions for the area’s not-for-profits. And they wanted to generate highly qualified leads and new business.

One of Serbin’s first steps was to engage the Xerox business development team to help build the program, secure speakers, and promote the event, dubbed “The Next-Level Workshop.” “We worked with Xerox to run our first event, and that taught us what we need to know to stage an event,” Serbin said. “We like their approach to planning, how they think things through.”

Xerox helped Mark Serbin to secure his top choice of keynote speakers, Peter Muir, an energetic print industry consultant and president of Bizucate, Inc., who also has extensive experience in the not-for-profit world. A number of other vendor partners contributed to the agenda as well, including Mohawk Paper, which provided samples of Serbin’s choice of specialty papers for event name tags and other uses at the event.

Serbin’s team also connected early on with three relevant organizations in the area, the Community Foundation of Sarasota, the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), and the Florida Public Relations Association (FPRA). The purpose: to gain support in identifying potential attendees and to coordinate a date that didn’t conflict with any programs those organizations were running.

The Community Foundation of Sarasota connection was especially fortuitous. The organization hosts monthly meetings featuring topical presentations as part of its educational programming and, recognizing a good fit, offered to host Serbin’s event in its 94-seat room free of charge as part of that series. Serbin needed a venue -- its facility couldn’t host an event of this size -- and gladly accepted.

Serbin mailed its invitations primarily to members of the AFP and FPRA because “their members are marketing communications people and other decision makers who control an awful lot of business, just the people we want to reach,” Serbin said. The list of 324 invitees also was supplemented with other not-for-profits who were Serbin customers or targets.

And the campaign Serbin used to invite this critical audience had to be strong, not only to secure attendance but to provide a compelling example of Serbin’s work as a first step to winning business.

“We wanted people to be blown away and say, ‘Wow, I had no idea this was available,’” Serbin explained. “That’s why we put on the event and why we used everything we could get our hands on in going to the marketplace. It’s about turning some heads and letting them see what we can do to help them grow.”

A Next-Level Campaign

Serbin and the company’s lead marketing consultant, Steve Smith, led a team of half a dozen people who developed the event and its promotional campaign. It kicked off with the save-the-date, message-in-a-bottle mailing. They borrowed the concept from a job the company had run for Serbin’s wife, Robin, when she was in real estate reaching out to people who had contacted the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce about moving there.

“Probably 90 percent of the recipients called her,” Serbin said. “When we talk about going to the next level with the workshop, we wanted to do that right from the start of our campaign, and that’s why we picked the message in a bottle. We had people calling in right after they got it, saying they wanted to sign up without even knowing what they were signing up for.”

The invitation also was an attention-getter that demonstrated Serbin’s capabilities: a pop-up mailer. Follow-up communications took one of three multi-step paths: one for responders, another for non-responders, and a third for colleagues referred by recipients using one of the PURL features.

Everyone who registered also was asked to choose three snacks they would get at the workshop. In a simple demonstration of personalization, photos of their chosen snacks appeared on their confirmations.

Peter Muir gave two presentations at the workshop. His keynote on “Elevating Your Cause and the Outcome of Your Efforts” was followed by a step-by-step description of the campaign that brought attendee’s to that day’s workshop. Indeed, the campaign was designed to include a few twists that demonstrate the advantages of an integrated campaign.

For example, to show how campaigns can run A-B testing to fine tune their offers, half of the Next-Level Workshop attendees had offers to be included in a drawing for a free gift if they participated in a pre-workshop survey; the other half, no offer. As Muir noted in his presentation, the percentage of survey responses was much higher from those who received the free gift offer -- great intelligence for a follow-up round of invitations or for the next campaign.

Similarly, the workbook every attendee received at the event containing the presentation slides and other materials had an effective image personalization demonstration on the back cover: a photo of Times Square with dozens of neon signs that were personalized for the recipient.

Indeed, Serbin went to extraordinary measures to ensure that each attendee’s event materials were personalized. Mark Serbin himself secured the last attendee after the registration portal had been closed. So he took down all her personalization information manually and worked with the IT staff to see that she had all the same personalized items at the event as those who registered via the Web.

“Everyone had to get the personalization experience,” he said. “That was the point of the event.”

Next-Level Results

Serbin intends to track the workshop’s results through a full season’s donor solicitation cycle, roughly from September to March -- in part because Serbin is conducting intensive follow-ups. “After-event marketing is as important as getting them there,” he said.

Everyone who was invited is now on Serbin’s bimonthly mailing list for ongoing communications and has received at least follow-up communications. Attendees and registrants have received more. These include a thank-you note, a discount offer, event workbooks for those who registered but didn’t attend, and an eye-catching dimensional mailer shaped like a fast food pie box delivering event materials on a USB drive shaped like the king on a chessboard. The personalized message: “The next move is yours.”

Of the 324 invitations Serbin mailed, 55 percent viewed their PURLs and 29 percent registered for the event, enough to fill the room and well over Serbin’s success target. Indeed, the invitation response was so “phenomenal,” Serbin said, that he cancelled a planned follow-up postcard. Of the registrants, 67 percent came from the mailing list, 18 percent from the “refer-a-colleague” link, and 15 percent from a generic link in the Community Foundation of Sarasota newsletter. The “refer-a-colleague” link also delivered 31 new contacts for Serbin’s bimonthly mailing list.

A customer satisfaction survey registered 100 percnt positive ratings on the event and included many comments that were heart-felt, Serbin noted, including one saying the information was so valuable they could have used another hour. Anecdotally, “We heard nothing but stellar reviews, that they truly saw the value of what we offered and were pleased with the information we provided.”

The Community Foundation was so impressed that it has invited Serbin to stage another event this year. Serbin expects to accept that invitation, while staging a similar event for another of its vertical markets and continuing to offer occasional, smaller-scale “lunch ‘n learns.”

Another resounding affirmation of the event’s value came from a local not-forprofit marketer whose director refused to let her attend. The reason: the approaches are too complicated and expensive; it would be a waste of time. Frustrated, the woman told Serbin there was no future working for an organization that wasn’t interested in finding out what was possible, and she subsequently resigned.

And solid business results have been registered, as well. Within a few weeks, Serbin credited the event with delivering new print jobs, from new and existing customers. They included a no-show who responded to post-event marketing, an existing customer who committed to their first variable-data communication after years of nay-saying, and one order for a message-in-a-bottle campaign. In addition, the event has led to six project quotes from attendees and seven follow-up meetings to discuss Serbin’s capabilities.

“There’s a job and there’s a lifetime value,” Serbin said about these contacts. “If the first job is successful, you may have a customer for life.”

Now that’s “Next-Level” thinking.

www.serbinprinting.com

Case study reprinted in part with permission from Xerox; edited by Mark Vruno.