Variable Data Printing

Has the Promise of Document Personalization Finally Arrived?

By Ted Seward

In recent years, variable data printing (VDP) and one-to-one marketing have generated considerable discussion and excitement in the document-processing industry. The concept of VDP touts the value of personalized documents that target customers with a known need or interest in a product. VDP capitalizes on data collected about customer preferences to create documents that rise above the din of competitive messages.

Previously, the technology to issue personalized documents did not exist. Traditional printing presses and office copiers have not provided the facility to link customer data to customized documents. With this reality, the next best tool at marketers’ disposal were mass marketing mailpieces offering rather disappointing response rates. Today, with the advent of digital printers and advanced database systems, the promise of one-to-one documents that perform well beyond generic "junk" mail is within reach. Selective data mining, thoughtful document composition and VDP technology now make it possible to produce documents that command dramatically improved customer response.

Customer Response to Variable Data Printing

According to document industry research, the typical response rate for bulk mail is well under 2 percent. Adding targeted personalization, however, causes that rate to jump to nearly 14 percent—a sevenfold increase—and some industry pundits put that figure even higher. This data suggest a quantifiable profit advantage for companies using personalized documents as a direct marketing tool, especially as the level of personalization increases.

Obstacles to Personalized Document Production

Despite the promise of one-to-one marketing, VDP adoption has been relatively slow to build. While traditional data center printing has incorporated a comparatively basic level of personalization in select document areas, lettershops and service bureaus have been slow to come aboard. Until recently, several obstacles have kept print-for-pay providers from implementing personalized document systems.

Technical Support

Most customization solutions available today are designed for large-scale, “enterprise” installations that focus on transactional documents like invoices, statements and other applications commonly found in data center printingenvironments. These systems usually require a high level of technical support from internal IT staff or specialized technical consultants. While these software products do a good job in high-volume data center environments where applications are left to run day after day, they can’t satisfy the more dynamically changing customer requirements of service bureaus, letter shops, and in-plant print providers.

With a high reliance on IT support, many VDP solutions are not appropriate for direct mail or direct-to-press scenarios, and often miss the mark for highly variable applications. The one-off nature of most one-to-one marketing campaigns involves relatively short runs (often, only between a few hundred and several thousand). In this commercial environment, systems designed for the repeated and lengthy runs of large enterprise billing and statement production are likely too complicated and too burdensome to support.

Price

Many service bureaus and print shops find enterprise VDP solutions to be prohibitively expensive. Print-for-pay providers don’t usually operate with profit margins or internal budgets that allow for the investment needed. Since service bureaus build their business on an infrastructure designed for maximum flexibility via multiple printers, many find that they cannot justify the expense of these ongoing individual printer license fees. To make matters worse, most VDP systems come with volume “governors” that restrict the number of pages per minute that can be processed, or overall volumes per month.

To bring at least a rudimentary level of personalization capability in house, many shops use the mail merge function in Microsoft Word. This function is appropriate for small volumes, but the results speak for themselves: variable-data jobs using only a simple mail merge fail to realize the full potential of true dynamic personalization. This quickly becomes plain to customers with serious one-to-one marketing ambitions, who soon look for other providers with more robust capabilities. This “free” resource built into common office software is no substitute for a dedicated VDP solution—and the resulting impact for many shops is lost revenue and inefficient production.

Ease of Use

Until recently, document personalization systems required a high degree of technical support with specialized skill sets in programming, database integration, print protocols and document composition. For internal marketing departments, this leaves the implementation of any one-to-one marketing campaign in the hands of programmers who lack graphic design or marketing expertise—a hand-off that too often results at best in mismatched expectations, and at worst flawed deliverables and even project failure.

As IT departments continue to be dramatically reduced, variable data initiatives typically languish at the bottom of their to-do lists—and funding for outside contractors is rarely viewed as an acceptable budget priority. Rather than risk coming up short with technical support, most shops choose to play it safe with Word’s mail merge feature or by stretching their pre-press limits. These VDP “solutions” fall far short of the robust customer database integration that can truly make a difference in the crucial struggle to improve response rates.

Poised for Personalization

Document and database technology has evolved to the point at which designing, deploying and distributing highly personalized collateral is no longer reserved for enterprise-sized installations with highly specialized technical resources. Service bureaus, letter shops and in-plant print providers can now leverage their digital printing investments and realize the full promise of document personalization and one-to-one marketing. Marketing firms and internal sales organizations can sidestep their reliance on diminishing IT support and design customer documents that drive previously unprecedented responses—all from highly manageable investments of skills and capital.

In short, the industry is now poised for a new generation of personalization that can effectively sell anything from cars to cosmetics—without drastic increases in marketing costs, and with a new level of customer trust and confidence that goes well beyond bulk mail campaigns.

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About the Author
Ted Seward is Vice President of Marketing for BCC Software, the leading developer of high performance PC-based software and solutions for professional mailers. BCC's flagship product, Mail Manager 2010, allows users to optimize postal presorts, utilize streamlined database maintenance functions, and improve deliverability of mailpieces.

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