Welcome to Darwillisms where we will share news and our views on what is happening in the world of integrated communications.
Web to Print-When does it make sense?
Category: Execution
Thursday, 26 January 2012 12:57
Whatever you call it — e-commerce, Web-to-print, Web commerce, online document management — the ability to transition some or all of your printing needs to an online portal so you can order and print on demand can be a huge benefit for an organization. If you have not already transitioned to some form of online ordering and document management, let’s take a look at some of the benefits.
Brand preservation. By centralizing documents and limiting access only to authorized users, the most recent documents, and creating workflows for authorization and approval of any changes, you create an environment that ensures accuracy and that preserves and protects the brand. You also maintain control over quality, color, and content.
Time savings. There can be tremendous time saved by using automation to order, customize, and manage documents. Documents can be created online or the repository can be populated with documents previously created by your organization (or both). Documents can be ordered in static form or customized or personalized within limits set by you.
Reduction in fulfillment errors. Especially in high-volume corporate environments, errors from literature fulfillment can be very expensive. This is because the process is often handled manually, so error rates can be very high. When one travel insurance company switched from manual fulfillment to Web-to-print, for example, its errors dropped to nearly zero. Agents access the secure website, select the style of brochure they want, upload their logos, insert their phone numbers and Web addresses, and the system automatically populates the brochure with the correct information. The orders are processed, printed, and shipped daily. Fulfillment errors are almost nonexistent.
Reduction or elimination of error and duplication in the design process. Design agencies, distributors, regional offices, and others are often working independently of one another and duplicating their design efforts. Not only does this create tremendous opportunity for erosion of the brand, but it also can be very expensive since each pays to design its own flyers, brochures, and other collateral.
By working from a centralized environment, the savings achieved by eliminating duplicate costs and content errors can be tremendous. I read one case study of an investment management firm that saved $350,000 within the first few months of implementing W2P for its 401(k) sales proposal kits, even though its fulfillment volume rose by 58%.
Savings in print and postage costs. Print and postage costs also can be slashed. Volumes may drop because orders are occurring only on an as-needed basis. Why pay for printed documents that will only be thrown away? Large corporations may also benefit from ganging orders. Even if wach branch office, retailer, or other third party orders only 100 brochures, the total volume may be high enough to qualify for significant postal discounts.
Faster response time. What is the value of your time? Or the revenue generated as a result of faster responses to inquiries or time to market? One Nevada-based university used to take weeks to produce its fundraising materials. By moving to a Web-to-print model, its fundraising campaign directors have been producing its donor literature (including personalizing down to the donor level) in less than 30 minutes.
Boosting revenues through relevance. Then there are the benefits of more effective marketing. By making it easier to personalize and customize documents, as well as putting the tools for localized marketing into the hands of distributors, retailers, franchises, and resellers, these marketing tools become more relevant to the end recipients and have far greater impact. Thus, W2P-generated applications can not only reduce costs but generate more revenue.
These are some dramatic numbers, but they are not unrealistic when you consider the vast inefficiencies inherent in any manual ordering process. W2P isn’t going to be right for every document in your repository, of course, but have you considered the value of the move for those that are?
Polls Versus the Ballot Box: What It Can Mean to Your Marketing
Category: Measure
Wednesday, 11 January 2012 13:30
As the election season heats up for the presidential election showdown in November, the public is inundated with results from polls describing the acceptance or the relevance of this policy or that candidate. Keep in mind though, whatever your level of political interest, a poll is only significant based on what it measures.
A poll only reports the results of the opinions of a relatively small groups of people, and can be influenced by how the questions are prepared and how receptive the respondents are to the inquiry. (Next time a pollster calls during your dinner hour, you’ll know what a challenge this may present!) Yet, for all the emphasis on polls, the only result that matters is in the voting booth.
In your business, you face the same challenges, where customers tell you one thing, and then do completely the opposite. That’s where measurement comes into play. With any campaign, you not only have to monitor the outcome, you have to measure the right thing. There’s a classic marketing story of a boom-box maker who brought in a focus group to test-market colors on boom boxes. In the focus group, the consumers said they preferred black boom boxes; at the conclusion of the test, the consumers allowed to pick from a selection of boom boxes on the way out of the conference room. The overwhelming color choice? Yellow!
Fortunately, web analytics have made it much easier to track user behavior, and you can test-message broadcast emails to measure effectiveness. But what about direct mail? As with all marketing, it’s important to have a goal and a strategy. Are you going to measure success by cost per acquisition? Cost per piece? The response rate? Pick a metric based on your goal, and stick to that. And don’t forget to put into place processes that will help you achieve your goal. For example, if the goal is to acquire leads by having an offer tied to a phone number or email, make sure your call center or sales team is briefed in the proper response.
Entrepreneurs and small-business owners are optimists, and optimism can sometimes amplify expectations. But by keeping expectations within the scope of what direct mail and marketing campaigns can achieve, you’ll be much more pleased with the results.
Building Databases: Step 1 (Start with the Basics)
Category: Data
Tuesday, 10 January 2012 11:20
We have previously discussed how building a database doesn’t have to be a painful or daunting process. There are a few simple, cost-effective steps to get you to a point where personalized marketing can be a reality. Before you get those steps, however, you have to start at the beginning. Here are the steps we suggest following when teaming up with us to build yourself a quality database:
Step one. Provide Darwill with your existing list and let us see what’s in it. Database-building starts with analyzing just what you do — and do not — have in there.
Step two. Darwill will use your data to build a simple spreadsheet, then run it through the de-dupe and address correction process.
Step three. Darwill will ask you questions in order to standardize the different fields according to your marketing goals. For example, you might want to change all of the fields to uppercase. You might want to abbreviate and standardize terms such as “Street” and “Avenue” and turn them into “St.” and “Ave.” Or, if you have two individuals living in the same household, you might want to make decisions about whether you want to mail to both or whether you want to select only one individual per location.
Step four. Decide which data will actually be used in the marketing efforts and which will be used to generate reports only. For example, you might not intend to use a contact’s vertical market as part of your targeting, but you might want to see a report on how various vertical markets fared.
The level of detail will determine which tool we use to build the final database. We have certain internal database tools that we can use or, for more complex projects, even do a custom build for you!
Stay tuned for more details to come this week around making a list buy!
Will You Get Better Direct Mail Response from Single Window or Double Window Envelopes
Category: Execution
Thursday, 05 January 2012 10:07
Should You Be Customer Profiling?
Category: Measure
Tuesday, 03 January 2012 11:16
In casual conversation, the word “profiling” often has a negative connotation, but in marketing, it is a driving force behind success. Building a customer profile helps you understand your customers’ attitudes, interests and preferences, and tailor your marketing to these and other factors relevant to their buying behavior.
How does it work? To create targeted campaigns, marketers typically do a basic select by some kind of relevant demographic. A travel agency might select consumers of retirement age, for example, because they tend to have more leisure time. Customer profiles take this a step further, layering on home ownership, median home value and other factors that provide insight into disposable income. It might include whether or not they have purchased a vacation in the past.
How do you develop a profile of your customers? Smaller marketers often have little data to work with, but tools for getting around this are exploding.
1. You can purchase data cuts of increased detail. For a few more dollars per thousand, you can purchase a more refined data select than a single cut. In the earlier example, this might be a list of consumers aged 65 or older who own homes worth at least $150,000 and have purchased at least one vacation in the past 12 months. The trick is to balance the increased cost of the data with the likelihood that it will bring a greater return. This is where testing becomes critical. The more you test, the more you know what brings additional value and what does not.
2. You can append your existing list with additional data. If you have an existing customer list, you can do what is called an “append,” or purchase additional data on those same customers that will create a relevant customer profile. You can do this even if you have nothing but an e-mail list. It’s called a “reverse append.”
3. You can purchase complete customer profiles from list companies like Accudata, Nielsen and Dun & Bradstreet. These companies are increasingly providing packaged solutions aimed at helping small and mid-sized business owners with an overall demographic overview of customers who spend the most money in their markets. These include both standard selects like median household income and business standard industrial classification (SIC), as well as proprietary categories like “wealth scores” and “super niches.”
Customer profiling sounds like a scary word, but even for smaller marketers, it doesn’t have to be. Talk to us about creating a customer profile and taking your targeted and personalized marketing to the next level.
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