Written by Bill Michael
eMarketing Manager, Xerox Corporation
Here in the United States, we have this phenomenon known as the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. March Madness. The Big Dance. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It overtakes schools, media, and the workplace, turning even the casual sports fan into a hyper-enthusiast.
In the spirit of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, we put together a fun little bracket of our own for the digital print industry, complete with a collection of digital print success stories going head-to-head in regions such as Books/Manuals, Direct Marketing, Packaging, and Transactional/Promotional. Much like the actual tournament itself, this field serves as a good comparison to see what strategies the industry is employing, how they’ve found value in doing so, and how you can implement those successes into your everyday business. And while this is obviously a theoretical simulation, it begs the question: Which success stories do you see coming out of each region?
Books/Manuals Region
The Books/Manuals region takes place in both static and personalized form, and competes in formats such as magazines, coffee table editions, booklets and combinations of offset and digital.
Participants in the field include:
- A printer who was able to exceed customer’s expectations by turning around dissertation books with incredibly short notice and below budget, resulting in a strong customer relationship and an increase in their book production volume of 300% for the following year.
- A 100% variable magazine, with 60 pages of content tailored to each individual reader, providing better definition of segments, and thus greater demand from advertisers. Targeted advertisements saw 256% more leads than static advertisements.
Direct Marketing Region
The highly competitive and metric-focused Direct Marketing region includes participants in the client-focused and self-promotional spaces, and contains the gamut from print-exclusive offerings to cross-media approaches with technologies such as PURLs and QR Codes.
Participants in the field include:
- A self-promotional cross-media campaign to generate awareness among customers and prospects of new technology offerings, resulting in a 17% response rate, 11.5% registration rate, and 68.5% conversion rate.
- A cross-media campaign that helped a university quadruple applicants and double enrollment over previous year, with 29% of recipients visiting their PURL. Even better was the final cost, which was 10% lower than the static campaign produced the previous year.
Packaging Region
Participants of the Packaging region include B2C and B2B offerings, relying on competitive advantages such as short-run capabilities, quick turnaround times, and highly-personalized output achieved through web-to-print solutions.
Participants in the field include:
- Personalized, on-demand digital packaging solution for Microsoft, reducing production time from 20 days to 72 hours, eliminating obsolescence, and providing unique anti-counterfeiting capabilities.
- A fully customized chocolate packaging solution, leveraging a web-to-print structure and producing over 11,000 boxes during a single Christmas season – generating over $100,000 for the printer.
Transactional/Promotional Region
The Transactional/Promotional region takes place in many venues, including industries such as airline, telecommunications, financial, and health services with participants boasting integration of relevant, personalized promotional messaging to complement transactional statements.
Participants in the field include:
- Printer who helped a credit union redesign their previous offset monthly account statement that was overprinted digitally with basic personal information. The newly redesigned statement eliminated warehouse costs, reduced mailing costs, decreased call-center volume, and allowed for highly-targeted promotional messaging.
- A frequent flyer member statement for a large airline had included very general promotional offers and were costly to produce. A printer helped redesign the statements using digital printing and variable data solutions, allowing the airline to include 20 different promotional messages and up to 200 variable images. The airline saw a 30% reduction in the cost to produce their statements.
Interested in other success stories? You may want to check out:
