by Brittany Kiernan on dec 9, 2015
Despite all the attention digital marketing gets, print marketing is still an excellent way to reach your consumers. Traditional print marketing campaigns, such as direct mail marketing campaigns, can and do have an impact on consumer behavior when they are well executed. Successful print marketing campaigns are all about maximizing your return on investment (ROI). So, how can you boost the ROI on your next print marketing campaign? Let’s take a look.
One of the best ways to improve your ROI on print marketing campaigns is to work toward improving response rates. The more consumers respond to an offer, the more revenue you will generate. Targeting is the key to boosting response rates. A good rule of thumb is that weak offers sent out to a highly targeted group of consumers will always resonate better than strong offers sent out to a random group of consumers. Therefore, to boost your ROI, you need to make sure you’re spending time and money to effectively target consumers.
Personalization is a powerful tool, especially when it comes to print marketing. Leads who are nurtured with personalized content are 20 percent more likely to make a purchase, while 61 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that delivers customized content. The vast majority of consumers—90 percent—report that custom content is more useful than generic content, and close to 80 percent of all consumers feel that brands who provide customized, personalized content are more interested in building long-lasting relationships with consumers. The research is clear: personalization can help you curate a better brand image, drive more sales, and improve your bottom line.
Variable printing is an easy and efficient way to personalize your print marketing materials, thereby allowing you to boost the ROI of your print marketing campaign. So, what is variable printing? Well, variable printing, sometimes also called variable dating printing, is a kind of customizable digital printing. This allows you to easily change the text and graphics on each individual piece of media without slowing down the printing process, as a computer application takes content from your database and integrates it onto a piece of media according to pre-defined criteria and parameters. So you can personalize media with a customer’s name, change the color scheme based on the demographic you are targeting, and offer customer-specific promotions. As a result, you will save both time and money. In fact, research shows that revenue from personalized marketing programs is some 30 percent higher than non-personalized marketing programs.
Many companies eschew traditional forms of print marketing in favor of digital marketing, however, it is possible, and actually advantageous, to integrate your print marketing campaigns with digital marketing strategies. This allows you to use print marketing materials as a pathway to direct your consumers to online channels. QR codes, a kind of matrix of barcodes that directs a consumer to a URL when scanned with a smartphone, is an excellent way to integrate print and digital. And with variable printing, it is easy to customize each piece of media with individualized QR codes. You can use QR codes to direct users to one of your social media pages or to personalized URLs, known as PURLs. Research shows that integrating digital with print is a surefire way to boost response rates to your print marketing campaigns, which in turn boosts your ROI. For example, research shows that direct mail marketing materials that direct consumers to PURLs have a five-times-higher response rate.
Sources: http://triblio.com/content-personalization-statistics-2015/
