Why you should use personalised standard formats instead of extraordinary special formats
Sometimes Marketers and agencies don’t seem to know any limits when it comes to creative mailing formats. A postcard that smells like strawberries? Or would you prefer a fold-out 3D self-mailer in the shape of a passenger train? Everything seems possible – but is it profitable? Most of the time, the costs for printing and postage of such fancy print advertising are not in proportion to the generated conversion rates or the expected recall effect. Moreover, massive print runs are necessary to even cover the initial costs.
The result: you have to send out a lot of unpersonalised mass mailings and it is hardly possible to reach smaller target groups with special formats or to provide relevant content at the right time. Systematically targeted personalised standard formats, on the other hand, can be used profitably in cross-channel marketing.
Still not convinced? We give you 5 reasons why you should choose standard formats for your next print mailing.
1. Get started quickly and easily
Print needs more preparation time than an email, no question. But this lead time is greatly reduced if you select standard formats such as the maxi postcard or the letter in a blank envelope, as printers usually have everything in stock for these formats and can produce quickly. For example, we can guarantee paper and production capacity for campaigns in standard formats up to a run of 200,000 without any advance planning. Larger volumes must be requested and planned for separately.
This is especially useful for occasions like Black Friday, Christmas and Easter – especially if you have little or no experience with print. That’s why we have deliberately decided to offer you a selection of predefined standard formats via our platform, which saves you valuable time in the jungle of formats and papers and at the same time gives you creative freedom. We currently offer these standard products:
2. Relevant content inspires customers more
“Content is King” – that’s why content will always be more important than fancy formats. So focus on standard formats and spend the time you save on producing engaging content. The information you collect in your Marketing Cloud tells you a lot about the purchase frequency, product preferences or AOV (average order value) of your customers. These valuable insights are the key to relevant content. If you analyse them accordingly, you can identify customer groups for whom direct mail would be worthwhile, e.g. inactive, particularly loyal or new customers who have only bought from you once.
For example, you can send them an email first as part of a reactivation campaign. If they don’t respond, you can send them a print mailing after a certain period of time. Or you can use the power of your most loyal customers to attract new customers by giving them a second voucher to share with friends and family. There is also great potential in the second-order push, for example, if you recommend products to your newest customers on the print mailing that exactly match their first purchase, giving them a warm welcome and making them even more curious about your brand or company.
3. More agile campaigns with digital print
Successful campaigns are agile, personalisable and require as little manual intervention as possible – and that’s exactly what you get with digital print. All information about the print job is transferred as a data record to the printing machine’s computer and printed directly from there onto the paper without a fixed printing form. The combination of digital print and agile standard formats such as the maxi postcard or the letter in a blank envelope reduces your outlay enormously. The maxi postcard is an absolute customer favourite, especially during the highly frequented “high season events” such as Black Friday, Christmas or Easter. It is not only the cheapest format, but also the quickest to produce. Unlike a letter, it only needs to be cut and not additionally folded and enveloped.
4. Lower costs, big effect
Paper and production costs are always a cost factor in print, so it’s especially important to reach customers as efficiently as possible in the future. In fact, with our range of standard formats, you can even achieve a price difference of a huge 680%! This is exactly what one customer managed to do thanks to our solution: if the company had continued to personalise a DIN A6 postcard and envelope by hand and send it with a real stamp, then with a lead time of 6 weeks and a print run of 70,000, it would still be paying around 1.02€ per piece without postage. Our software integration enabled the company to implement the same product with an imitated, i.e. printed, handwriting with a lead time of 2 to 3 weeks and a print run of 30,000 pieces for only 0.15€ per piece without postage.
If you use our platform as a customer, you can use our practical price calculator to quickly and easily calculate costs for print runs of up to 200,000 copies.
5. Bundle use cases for more efficiency
Another advantage of standard formats is that you can combine several use cases in one campaign. For example, if you create a campaign called “Maxi Postcard” on our platform, you can bundle several use cases, such as a second order push, birthday greetings and a reactivation. To do this, all use cases must have the same format and design elements. Of course, you can personalise the content. The advantage of this is that with personalised small print runs you can still reach the quantities that give you better postage conditions for dialogue mail at Deutsche Post (from 500 and from 5000 pieces).
Customer loyalty today is personalised and agile
In the end, what counts is that you give the customers the feeling that you understand their needs. Relevant image language and exclusive incentives are much more effective than small gimmicks that cost a lot. At optilyz, we aim to integrate print as a performance channel into your customer journey and use it in a data-driven way. The best way to do this is with smart standard formats that reduce your efforts and make your print campaigns more agile and targeted. Would you like to learn more about our software integration? Then try us out with a free demo!
