How to get your share of 170bn marketing pages

At the same time there's an increase in both print on demand and variable printing, and together they are slated to account for more than 170 billion colour and black-and-white impressions.

You can tap into this market opportunity with personalised communications that use relevant text, images and graphics to gain attention, increase readership and - most importantly - evoke action.

The personalised marketing continuum

Let's start at the beginning, or what could be referred to as “E-Z” personalisation.

When the landscape of personalised print programmes is examined, many materials are as simple as two-sided, full-colour postcards. These can be as one-to-one as any other collateral. They're economical and often break through marketing clutter with clever imagery that isn't hidden by an envelope. Calendars, newsletters and even sales and marketing materials also use personalised content.

An emerging category of one-to-one marketing can be called image-intensive communications and includes applications using advanced databases. These jobs have images that change for either small groups of recipients or one recipient at a time. Also, they can use variable information, such as image personalisation and data-driven graphics.

The next step up in the one-to-one marketing continuum is Web storefronts and custom sites that drive one-to-one marketing programmes. The jobs that are driven from these sites can be simple or they can offer multiple variables and rich image content. These sites typically contain additional Web capabilities, such as ordering, credit card processing and invoicing, which are offered in most off-the-shelf solutions.

One-to-one cross-media publishing is at the apex of the continuum. This is the most sophisticated type of personalisation programme, with integrated print, Web and email campaigns. These projects often involve more complex variable information and large production requirements. It is these multi-phase, multi-channel campaigns that fully leverage the response-generating capabilities of using relevant data with high quality creative in a closed-loop marketing programme.

An example of what a one-to-one cross-media campaign might entail: the initial communication could be a postcard or email with customer-specific personalisation based on previous knowledge of the recipient. The call-to-action is a visit to a response URL on the Web, which might include a survey that gathers more information about the recipient and includes an offer. The new data is saved back to the database in real time, and a thank you letter is sent by mail or email.

Throughout all of this, marketers are provided with a response tracking dashboard that gives them real time information on the progress of the campaign in detailed reports, allowing them to adjust content, messaging, the offer, or other elements of the campaign, literally on-the-fly.

One-to-one communications has finally arrived.