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24th August 2020
For a long time now marketing with a personalised message to all customers has been known to be a successful tactic. Technology is always improving how this tactic can be used. Within email marketing, personalised campaigns where users are sent emails based on behaviours have been used for years. Social media has also seen a rise in personalised marketing techniques.
One area where the tactic is often under utilised however is with printed marketing. In fact, variable data is not only possible with printed marketing materials, but it is a must in today’s consumer market. So, what are we talking about with variable data and what are the advantages?
While there is audience targeting, even within an audience there are differences. Audiences might be at different parts of the purchasing journey, customers could have different priorities and there could be things like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. When you’re adding variable data to your printing, then you’re making all marketing materials unique to each customer. Examples could be adding the name of the customer on a leaflet or perhaps their birthday.
Alternatively, you could add a picture of a recent purchase that they’ve made or just reference it. These are little touches of personalisation that can help you to generate interest in your brand and get customers to continue to come back to your business.
There are numerous advantages of variable data within printed marketing materials, here are some of the top benefits you can experience.
The most obvious advantage is that customers are going to be more receptive to the messages you deliver to them. According to research, 75% of customers appreciate it when brands use personalised messages on printed materials. In addition, 86% of consumers state that personalised messages form part of the purchasing decisions.
And if you can add personalised suggestions to your printed marketing campaigns, you can benefit as well. Four out of every five customers like it when brands make personalised recommendations for them.
Therefore, increasing the use of variable data can help you make more out of printed materials. You could see more engagement with customers that can lead to higher leads and more sales from a single campaign.
What is the next step when it comes to making sales from your printed materials? Do they need to call you? Do they need to contact their sales agent? If you own multiple locations or have sales agents who are assigned to specific leads, you can use this variable data on the marketing information. This will prevent customers from abandoning the next step because contacting you is inconvenient or they don’t know where their closest store is located.
It can also help you to build a stronger rapport with your audience. You can include the name of the sales team member or the local manager. This gives your brand more personality and makes it harder to resist for customers.
Want to know more about how different areas/customers/groups are responding to your campaigns? Or do you want to know what personalised information is more attractive to audiences? Then you can use variable data to add unique or audience specific discount codes/reference codes that can help you keep track of the most successful campaigns.
For instance, say you want to have one design that uses the audiences first name and another design that uses their surname, you can use a unique code for each group to determine what audiences prefer. This allows you to split test on all campaigns and build a greater awareness of what audiences prefer.
You can’t deny there is a significant growth in online marketing and online sales. However, that doesn’t change much about the marketing landscape. Successful campaigns must be both strategic and tactful. And there is a lot of research and experiments that have shown that personalised print marketing helps online marketing. This is because, unlike digital marketing components, print marketing is tangible and doesn’t disappear if the audience clicks off a screen. In fact, most print marketing sits on a dinning room table or other area of the house. Some is even placed in a draw or on a notice board for later use.
When the time is right, customers can then switch to the digital channels to find out more information or complete an order. And you can use digital behaviours to enhance printed marketing materials. If you have monitoring software, you can notice when customers have been looking at certain products on your website. You can then use variable data to send campaigns that tempt the user back to the website for the products that they’ve been viewing.
Print marketing tends to have a response rate of about 2% when there is no variable data used within the printing. However, by adjusting the content through variable data you can increase the response rate by up to 300! This is a massive increase and will lead to a higher ROI. Therefore, it becomes more profitable for you to use print marketing and start delivering leaflets to your local area again.
Print marketing is often seen as negatively by customers. Junk mail or spam are the words that are often used by customers who see lots of leaflets in their post every day or a person just dropping off leaflets at every house on the road. However, that is for print marketing materials that don’t use variable data within the content. Instead, you can increase the value, returns and the perception of your brand by using premium printed materials that are customised and personalised for the recipients.
The result will be more customers buying from your printed marketing campaigns and a better brand image. You might also find that you can see potential customers passing around your leaflets among friends and family as they discuss what offers and personalisation they’ve got.
Contact Us to learn more about how variable data printing can help your business.
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