26 Feb Digital printing – getting personal

Of course the danger is that we personalise for personalisation’s sake, in order to fulfil business trends, when in fact the real power is in reaching a market that perhaps was unnattainable through conventional promotional print.

The direct mail ‘plague’

As consumers, our mailboxes heave under an ever-ending influx of direct mail, which with the application of variable data, is more often than not personalised, but there are many other routes to personalisation which are borne out of creative thinking.

Products with an individual edge

A classic is the personalisation of promotional-related printed products such as calendars. By applying a customer brand or a recipient’s name to a variety of graphical treatments, creating a month-by-month set of personalised images, a single individualised calendar can be produced, rolling out if required for each contact across a full database. Whilst this powerful use of personalisation is endearing to the recipient and highlights the capability of dynamic digital print, the concept could already be considered ‘old hat’ and therein lies one of the main issues. The speed at which this technology is growing means that whatever becomes the latest digital printing ‘product wow trend’ is eagerly over-practiced and suddenly a particular style of product personalisation becomes underwhelming.

New opportunities for targeting

For me, the real power of personalisation is giving us a company such as ourselves the creedence to talk to individual customers and identify their business opportunities and how personalisation could work for them. As a simple example, on a product or service catalogue, rather than mailing out 1,000 identical units, the opportunity may be ripe to categorise the recipient data and let’s say personalise the cover in each category to appeal to each respective set of recipients. So out of 1,000 copies, we could produce a quantity split of 100 x 5 sorts, each individually personalised to fulfil the buying potential of that set of recipients. Categorisation could be based on previous buying trends, business sector appeal or otherwise.

And of course personalisation doesn’t stop with print, web marketing can also be targeted in parallel.

All food for thought for your next campaign!