From research by Aberdeen Group: Users of Print On-Demand achieved a 42% higher customer retention rate than non-users.

Among their findings was a correlation between companies that use a Print On-Demand solution and a dramatic improvement in customer retention. In an economy where every customer counts, a 42% higher customer retention rate among Print On-Demand users is more than noteworthy. But what’s the correlation? How does POD impact on customer retention so significantly?

Three Reasons Print On-Demand Improves Customer Retention

1. More timely – With on-demand printing, written communications and printed materials get in the hands of prospects or customers more quickly, as the materials are produced and delivered immediately, instead of waiting weeks to be batched with other orders.
2. Improved relevancy – Printed materials can easily be customized to be relevant to the recipient using a Print On-Demand system. For example, cross-selling, new customer assimilation, and segmentation strategies can all be applied, one customer at a time.
3. It builds better relationships – By empowering true 1-to-1 communication, personal communications can be customized to come from their sales or customer service representative to the intended recipient.

Follow this link to download a free report including additional findings from Aberdeen: Print On-Demand: Driving Efficiency and Revenue Growth with Organizational Print Portals.

Additional Benefits of On-Demand Printing

Many times when a company moves to a Print On-Demand or web-to-print solution, another significant shift happens. They move from static off-set printing to digital printing. Several years ago many marketing professionals questioned the quality of digital print. Today, to the naked eye, it is practically impossible to tell the difference between commercial off-set printing and digital.

Using advanced digital printing and marketing automation technology, the delivery of printed materials becomes as easy as sending personalized, triggered email.  In fact, the use of both mail and email together becomes fast, efficient and very impactful.

Many companies have found it helpful to integrate their Marketing Asset Management solution with email and automated print deployment, making the creation and execution processes streamlined and efficient.  In fact, in addition to improved customer retention, many companies save hundreds of thousands of dollars by moving to an integrated POD system. (See case studies at www.mailprint.com)

Thanks to the Aberdeen Group for investing in the research that quantifies what was previously suspected: POD improves customer retention and bolsters ROMI by putting a serious dent in marketing execution costs.

The comparison below is based on Godin’s main points:

With tighter budgets and continued pressure to produce measurable results, the safer, predictable direct marketing process would seem a no-brainer. However, everyone from small business owners dabbling in marketing to seasoned advertising veterans are tempted to rely on their personal taste and gut instinct to determine what will appeal to and motivate the masses. This temptation is natural, but not justifiable, according to Godin:

“The key distinction [between direct marketing and mass marketing] is when you know it’s going to work. The mass marketer doesn’t know until the end. The direct marketer knows in the beginning. The mass marketer is betting on thousands of tiny cues, little clues, and unrecorded (but vital) conversations. The direct marketer is measuring conversion rates from the first day.

“That’s the reason we often default to acting like mass marketers. We’re putting off the day of reckoning, betting on the miracle around the corner, spending our time and energy on the early steps without the downside of admitting failure to the boss.

“Of course, just because it’s our default doesn’t mean it’s right. Business to business marketing is almost always better if you treat it like direct marketing. Most websites that do conversion as well. Same with non-profit fundraising.”

So, as it turns out, the distinction between mass and direct marketing is less about the size of your audience, and more about the process you follow to determine the right messaging for them. Are you willing to devote the time needed to test your message, and do you have the humility and persistence needed to acknowledge a failed test and try again? If so, then you’re on your way to achieving more powerful, scalable marketing.

You can read Godin’s complete post here.

Jason Kort, Director of Marketing for Redemption Plus

I recently had the chance to talk with Jason Kort, Director of Marketing for Redemption Plus, a leading distributor of incentive and redemption merchandise.  You may know them as the inventor of the “World’s Largest Whoopie Cushion.” Redemption Plus is no doubt a very fun business focused on delivering all the wonderful toys, games and prizes used by family entertainment and educational franchises nationwide.

Jason recently led the implementation of print automation and variable data technology that is improving the catalog that is essential to their business.  Here’s a portion of that interview:

How did you recognize that you needed a different process for producing electronic and hard copy catalogs?

JK:  There were really three areas that were driving me crazy:

1. It was taking too much time to create and produce a catalog and the instant we printed one it was out of date.
2. It took 10-15 minutes for our sales reps to send our catalog to individual prospects.
3. It was too hard for our customers to determine what they wanted to buy from us.

What was the biggest challenge to implementing an automated printing and digital file delivery system?

JK:  Variable data and print automation were new to us, so figuring out exactly what we needed and what we wanted to do was the biggest challenge.

What advice would you give other marketers who are changing to an automated variable data catalog?

JK:  This is really like an IT project.  Make sure you thoroughly define what you need and scope it out like an IT project.

Could you summarize the biggest benefit your personalized, on-demand catalog system has brought to Redemption Plus?

JK:  I’d love to narrow it to one, but I can only get to three:

1. The time it takes my sales reps to order catalogs has went from 10 minutes to 30 seconds.
2. We never print a catalog that is out-of-date due to the real-time integration with our product database.
3. It’s easy for our customers to quickly access the types of items they want to order, which has lead to an easy increase in sales.

Easy and relevant are the words that come to mind when describing this new tool Redemption Plus has created. Kudos to Jason and his team! To read more about Redemption Plus and their dream-come-true print-on-demand catalog, read the case study.

So how are the variable images and information used to create a personalized catalog?

Here are some visuals of the new and improved Redemption Plus catalog.

Click on the thumbnail images to view larger, with variable information circled.

On the catalog cover, customer information and the date are personalized.

Inside the catalog, products are customized based on current items in the database. Pricing is specific to the end-users’ mark-up requirements.

Sales rep information and photograph is automatically included.

Marketing budgets have begun shifting as well. Of the participants in the 2009 PRWeek/MS&L Social Media Survey 31% reported shifting in marketing and communications budgets to add social media to their mix, with 48% of their social budgets being pulled from past advertising budgets, 41% from direct marketing, 29% from media buying, and 18% from PR.

Despite these budget shifts, marketing executives surveyed in the study still say they believe each of the more traditional direct marketing, advertising and PR channels have a greater impact on the success of their company or brand.

Source: 2009 PRWeek/MS&L Social Media Survey

So even though marketers believe that direct marketing and other traditional tactics are more effective, they’re willing to divert budget to social media. Is this a rational decision to test new marketing tactics, or are marketers just succumbing to peer pressure and a search for “the next big thing?”

So does social media marketing actually work?

According to the study, 39% of respondents reported that “they are not convinced of the value or ROI” of social media. This may be due to the notorious difficultly of tracking and calculating conversions influenced by social media.

There are many commonly accepted case studies that have shown effective use of social media for business initiatives, including:

• B2C brand building through viral campaigns.
• Brand reference monitoring and proactive customer service/complaint response.
• B2B thought leadership (using outlets such as a blog or social network).
• B2C customer loyalty programs communicated through social media and mobile marketing.

With all of these business uses of social media, questions still remain about their actual revenue generation. As social marketing practices are honed and social tracking tools improve, this may change. However, it may not. Which leads us to…

Ready to test social media marketing for your organization? It's time to create a focused social marketing plan of attack.

The Marketer’s Dilemma, and a Plan of Action

So budgets are limited, and it’s time to start dividing your resources and time. Social marketing may be a winner for your audience and business model, and should probably be tested. So what percentages should you allocate to social marketing initiatives? Here are some suggestions:

1) Keep doing what’s working

If you’re achieving good ROIs for your direct marketing, PR or advertising, don’t reduce your budgets for these channels for something untested.

2) Allocate a test budget for social media

Is social marketing right for your business model and audience? There’s only one way to be sure. Start by allocating a portion of your budget, just as you would any test initiative.

3) Plan and focus your efforts

Before you start, make sure you have clearly identified your objectives and success metrics. Then, instead of trying to engage in every social media platform, choose one or two specific actions to focus your efforts. Some examples:

• Start a blog, and update it frequently.
• Set up a free Google Alerts on a specific topic, and monitor and engage in online discussions on the topic.
• Join or start a LinkedIn group on a topic of interest to potential customers.
• Create a simple series of YouTube videos answering common questions of your audience.
• Create a Facebook Fan Page or mobile site and distribute special offers to subscribers (location-specific restaurants and retailer should check out www.ruxter.com).

4) Analyze your results.

Can you attribute new customers to your online interactions? Did traffic and conversion for your website increase? Have you increased foot traffic to your locations? If so, congratulations, it’s time to allocate more budget and increase your social marketing efforts. If not, it’s either time to test other social marketing tactics, or funnel your budget and efforts back to the marketing channels you know work for your business.

So now I want to know, what social media tactics have you tested for your business, and what type of results have you seen?

Copywriting for variable data communications is lot like learning to write for the first time.

“Uestarday I playd my conpudar. It was fun. I had dinar. It was dullishish. Thin I had a popsicol.”

- As written by my 5-year-old son in his Kindergarten journal, translated as: “Yesterday I played my computer. It was fun. I had dinner. It was delicious. Then I had a popsicle.”

Copywriting for variable data communications is lot like learning to write for the first time. At first it seems uncomfortable and the result can be clunky copy that is readable, but doesn’t flow well. With practice, variable data copywriting takes less effort, becomes more impactful, and the copy flow smooths out until you don’t notice the use of variable information.

A few quick tips to quickly adapt to including variable data in your writing projects:

1. Know your data
2. Include the use of variable information in your Creative Brief
3. Focus on relevancy to the recipient
4. Incorporate variable data only where it improves the communication
5. Employ a great editor
6. Have another great copywriter review your work
7. Don’t forget to utilize the data to create relevant imagery

Copywriting for variable data communications requires a skill set that goes beyond typically copywriting. And as my 5-year-old would write, “If yu wont 2 be gud, yu hav to praktis.”

The effort to consolidate vendors, learn a new process, or simply loading a platform with the multitude of marketing materials and assets can be daunting. Although some companies become intimidated by the initial work it takes to launch a Marketing Communications Portal, Ferrellgas never batted an eyelash and tackled it head-on.

Today Ferrellgas can give you 80,000 reasons why that implementation process is well worth it. They will save at least $80,000 in their first year of using Mail Print’s marketing communications portal and were recently featured in Aberdeen’s report “Marketing Asset Management, Managing Brand Compliance in Distributed Marketing Environments.” The results have been everything they expected and more.

“It was an immediate, overnight turnaround, with far shorter production times, less repetitive effort, and more consultation and guidance being provided to the field offices,” said Brian Mater, Marketing Manager at Ferrellgas.

If you’d like to read more of the Ferrellgas story, check out our online Ferrellgas case study.

• “Response rates for Direct Mail have held steady over the past four years. Letter-sized envelopes, for instance, had a response rate this year of 3.42 percent for a house list and 1.38 percent for a prospect list.”
• “Response rates for B-to-B campaigns were generally higher than for B-to-C campaigns.  Lead generation and high-end average sale campaigns also had higher response rates.”
• “Email to a house list averaged:
  • a 19.47 percent open rate
  • a 6.64 percent click-through rate
  • a 1.73 percent conversion rate
  • a bounce-back rate of 3.72 percent
  • an unsubscribe rate of 0.77 percent”
• “Paid search had an average cost per click of $3.79, with a 3.81 percent conversion rate. The conversion rate (after click) of Internet display advertisements was slightly higher at 4.43 percent.”

Perhaps the most interesting stats involve the costs of producing a lead or sale via different marketing channels. Many companies and marketers focus more on the per-piece cost of the different channels, instead of the end game of actual sales, which may account for the flood of marketing emails in my inbox/spam filter.

According to the report: “Catalogs had the lowest cost per lead/order of $47.61, just ahead of inserts at $47.69, email at $53.85, and postcards $75.32.”

What kind of response and conversion rates are you experiencing? What marketing channels are performing best for you? Share your insights by clicking the comment button.

Providing too many options in a marketing asset management solution may create a decision process that is too intense and complicated.

Years ago, Columbia professor, Sheena Ivengar ran an interesting consumer test.  She set up a “free samples” table in a super market and proceeded to test the difference between sampling 6 jellies Vs. sampling 24 jellies.  The net result: when 6 jellies were presented, 40% of the shoppers stopped to sample, and 30% bought jelly.  While 60% of the shoppers stopped to sample from the 24 choices and only 3% actually bought jelly.

So we like the shopping experience, but struggle to make a decision when faced with too many options. I buy that.

So what does that have to do with Marketing Asset Management user adoption?

Users of marketing asset management systems are frequently distributed sales forces, marketing departments, franchises, retailers or local stores.   They use these systems to download logos and ads, and create brand-controlled, yet customizable marketing materials.

Having many options creates a great “shopping” experience and initial usage, but if too many customization options are given, over time the users may become stressed by the system.  This results in fewer ads being downloaded, fewer email and direct mail campaigns being initiated, and ultimately a decrease in the amount of marketing done by your users or locations.  Even worse, they may instead go outside the approved system and create materials that are not within branding standards.  All this can happen simply because designing or creating the marketing materials is a taxing decision process.

When this logic is applied to companies who utilize an online ordering application for marketing asset management and marketing automation, a hypothesis begins to form:

When it is important that users repeatedly use an asset management system, having too many options decreases the frequency with which they use the system.

At this moment I have no facts to prove this hypothesis, but it is something I have witnessed for the past six years working with our communications portal. I am not hopeful that I can convince a client to perform a test and actually share the results as this is not a measurement that marketing departments are interested in proving out.  So for now, we just have to be wise marketers and consider the decision process of the user when establishing how many “jellies”, asset or options are the right amount for an online marketing asset management system.  And by all means, if usage of your asset management system is declining, consider testing the number of assets and options you provide your users.  You may find that less is more.

Ready to move your marketing and sales operations to the front of the class? Check out Aberdeen's report on how Best-in-Class companies are dramatically improving ROI with Marketing Asset Management.

So if you could improve your ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) by 32%, would you do it? The Aberdeen Group has recently published a research study Marketing Asset Management: Managing Brand Compliance in Distributed Marketing Environments that highlights this significant increase in ROMI by Best in Class Companies using Marketing Asset Management.

The key summary points from the report for becoming a high-performing distributed marketing organization include:

1) When creating a marketing asset management system, build it for both sales and marketing to use.

2) Use a combination of marketing asset management and marketing automation. In other words, build the marketing asset library to actually deploy or produce what your sales and marketing teams need.

I’d like to add another:

3) User adoption will make or break your long-term success and ROMI.

The keys to developing great user adoption are usability of the system and training tools. And don’t give up after the initial push at the launch of the marketing asset management tool. All good systems for distributed marketing organizations are multi-faceted and require reinforcement and training.

If you’d like to learn more about the impact Marketing Asset Management can have on your organization, you can download the Aberdeen report here.

As an underwriter of the report, we’re pleased to be able to give you free access!

Mulling over your B2B lead generation process? Here are six "Ah-ha" moments to consider as you continue to improve your lead gen techniques.

Off. On. Off. On. If only lead generation were a faucet under my control. I am certainly seeing more need in our business and in our clients’ businesses for more leads, but only at specific times. Like most Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers today, my budget is still tight, but loosening up a bit, and I am always focused on the “Cha Ching,” or the ability of lead sources to produce profitable business.

This has made me rethink Mail Print’s lead generation process and I thought I would share my “Ah-ha” moments from the past several weeks:

1) Fake Leads Love Online Forms

Landing page forms only work if people give you real information. It’s really hard to communicate with someone named “No Name” at abc@abcdef.com. And, there’s no quicker way to turn off your sales team than to funnel them bogus leads. Make sure you have an automated or human filter in place to weed out invalid leads before they make it into your pipeline.

2) Always. Be. Testing.

Lead generation tactics can become ineffective quickly. Always think in terms of what worked before, what is working now, and how many tests need to be in progress to be able to generate leads in the future.

3) Generating A Lead Is Just The First Step

It’s about so much more than just generating leads. Lead generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing and the all important “close” are really one big progression. One break in the process and good leads fall through the cracks and your ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) declines.

4) Install A Lead Flow Lever

Having the right amount of lead flow is very important to adequately utilize inside sales teams. Unfortunately the amount of leads needed is constantly changing. There must be many levers to push and pull to keep everyone productive.

5) Email Lead Generation Is So 2004

Email marketing is a fantastic lead nurturing tool, but it is worthless today as a lead generation tool. Need proof? Just try to remember the last time you used your spam folder as a shopping cart.

6) Get Access To Decision Makers With Lumpy Mail Pieces

Packages or lumpy direct mail get past the gatekeeper. Sounds expensive, right? Yes, and that’s why it works. The administrative assistant can’t throw it away, so it ends up on the boss’ desk. For example, a new “heavy” prospecting tool that we created for Mail Print has already returned $10 for every $1 invested and we’ve only sent out 10% of what we have already paid for. Cha ching!

If you would like to see a sample of our “sneak it past the gatekeeper” direct mail piece, email me at rhondab[at]mailprint[dot]com. I’d be happy to share our latest innovation in variable data printing that seems to be confusing the heck out of gatekeepers and connecting us to senior and executive level management.

B2B lead generation is a work in process, literally. Working on both the tactics and the overall process is vital to finding the Cha Ching.