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Print Marketing for the Generational Divide: Part 2
September 17, 2007

For marketers, one of the phenomenal benefits of digital press production is the ability to use it to communicate on a 1:1 basis with your prospects and customers. As I discussed in Part 1, you can communicate with recipients down to the tone and flavor of the marketing message adjusted to the needs and preference of different demographic groups. 

You might speak differently to the 20s crowd than to the 40s crowd, for example, throwing in “texting” lingo or using references to the mobile culture. For the 40s crowd, you might slant the message toward the impact of products and services to career growth, family, or young children. For the 50s and 60s crowd, you might utilize a more formal tone and assume a higher level of professional achievement and perhaps more disposable income.

But this type of personalized marketing is too expensive for small and mid-sized businesses, right? The costs will be substantially higher than for a static job of the same length? Hardly!

To get some real-life numbers, I checked with Aaron Hale, vice president of digital communications at The Premium Color Group, Clifton, NJ, which specializes in 1:1 print personalization. We ran through all of the costs to personalize a job. Some of them may surprise you.

(Keep in mind that every printer has a different cost and pricing structure. These numbers are provided as one example only.)

For this analysis, I assumed a short-run job that will be produced most cost-effectively on a digital press, whether it is static or personalized. This allowed me to create an “apples to apples” comparison. Plus, it places the example within the budget even of small-sized marketers. Costs do not include design.

• List Acquisition: Whether a job is static or personalized, the basic list acquisition and mailing costs will be the same. The Premium Color Group charges $50–$60 per thousand names for the initial list, then anywhere from $20–$30 per thousand for each variable appended (such as age, gender, income, home ownership, special interests)

• List Clean-Up: Once the list has been purchased, it needs to be “scrubbed” or “cleaned,” which includes removing duplicates, clearly junk addresses, and the like. At PCG, this cost tops out at $125.

• Mapping & RIPing: Beyond what you would pay for static digital mailing, the only additional costs to personalize the job will be a fee to map the variable fields to each of the templates (say, gender, age, and income range). This could be anywhere from $50–$250, depending on the number of variables. Plus, there will be a RIP charge for preparing a digital file for output on press, usually around $50.

Assuming a mail list of 2,500, personalization adds only about $75 for the appended demographics, say $150 for the mapping (splitting the difference between $50–$250), and $50 for the RIP. In total, this is only an additional $275 or so to personalize the campaign. At 2,500 mailers, that’s an additional $.11 per mailer! And what do you think the additional relevance will do to the impact of your message?

Not that you have to personalize to each individual recipient to boost your marketing effectiveness. You could simply run segmented versions of the mailer (20-30s male, 20-30s female, 40s+ male, 40s+ female). This increases the relevance factor by targeting the message based on their demographic group. The cost? An additional $.03 per mailer.

• Production: Typical cost to produce a four-color sheet on a digital press is $1.00 - $1.50 per sheet. From this, you can cut four to six postcards, depending on their size. Even if you are on a budget, Hale of The Premium Color Group recommends not dropping below 6x9” in order to make the card stand out from “junk” mail.

All told, for personalization, you are looking at about $1,300 for the whole job, plus postage. For segmenting, it’s about $1000. So you’re looking at a total increase of only $100–$300 on a 2,500-piece job. This is not a lot of money to dramatically boost the effectiveness of your marketing. It certainly should be well within the budget of even small and mid-sized marketers.

This is just a discussion of cost. We haven’t even touched the potential impact on your bottom line.

Typical direct mail response rates are around 1%— or 25 pieces in this case. If you personalize the job and achieve a 12% response rate (which, assuming the job was done well, is a conservative number), this is 300 responses. So…25 responses or 300 responses. Take your pick.

Suddenly, that extra $300 looks like a bargain!

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on September 17, 2007 | Comments (0)