VeeDeePee

Chocolate Direct Mail

2008-11-28T06:58:49Z

In an effort to address the UK's declining direct mail volumes, Royal Mail hired Proximity London to create a sensory-based direct mail campaign. The agency used a chocolate mailing, which was contained in a heat-sensitive cover and was sent to 6,000 people at marketing and creative agencies in the UK to show how use of sensory mail could improve response rates on direct campaigns. A paper copy accompanied the chocolate letter in case recipients ate it.

The letter was designed to encourage the target audience to smell, touch and taste it, and explains the principle of engaging the senses to create more emotive connections with customers.

The campaign clearly emphasised direct mail's ability to appeal to the senses. Royal Mail claims that the campaign had a financial return six times greater than the original investment and the campaign recently won an Echo Award in Las Vegas.

A study by Brand Sense, a sensory branding consultancy, found consumers made decisions to buy particular products based on their ability to engage "sensory signals". Royal Mail said the chocolate mailing allowed direct marketers to engage with "more than three of their recipient's senses and improve campaign response rates for businesses".

While I've seen plenty of novel and innovative campaigns over the years, this is the first "unhealthy" direct mail piece that I've come across!

vRoam Global

2008-11-23T10:35:25Z

I came across a great VDP story a while ago and thought it was finally time to share it. Unlike many VDP case studies, this one isn't related to direct marketing, but instead leverages personalisation to create a highly relevant and user-friendly mail pack.

U&I Direct is a Sydney-based marketing service provider that consistently push the envelope to deliver unique approaches to addressing marketing challenges. One of their many clients, vRoam Global, provides overseas mobile phone services to some of Australia's leading corporate organisations. vRoam hires out mobile phone SIM cards that are pre-programmed according to each customer's destination country with the best mobile phone coverage and price packages available.

Previously, vRoam sent out user guides to customers with their temporary roaming SIM cards, which consisted of 6-8 black-and-white pages that were lengthy and complex to navigate. As a result, vRoam Global received a high volume of calls every month from disgruntled customers who needed further assistance to understand the SIM card activation and implementation instructions.

It was evident to vRoam Global that steps needed to be taken to ensure the process was an easier, less frustrating experience for its customers. Using XMPie PersonalEffect, U&I Direct provided the following solution:

1. First, vRoam Global's cluttered user guide was re-written and re-designed by U&I Direct into a streamlined, easy to read colour brochure. The new brochure is both personalised and relevant—including each customer's name, their overseas roaming number and a detailed trip itinerary.

2. A personalised identification card that can be detached and stored in a wallet or travel compendium was also designed for easy reference, listing the customers' SIM card number, PIN and personal details.

3. A postage paid return envelope is included in each mail pack to ensure easy return of the vRoam Global SIM card by the customer after arriving back in Australia.

4. Additonally, a personalised, automated SMS message notifies each customer of the pending delivery of the mail pack. Another follow up SMS message acknowledges the customer's arrival back into Australia with a reminder to return the SIM card to vRoam Global.

As a result of the new, easy to understand packs and extra customer communication via SMS, vRoam Global noted a huge drop in customer enquiries from 20–30 per month to an average of two per month. Using personalisation, the client not only reduced unnecessary print volumes, but also lowered call volumes!

previous mail pack

personalised pack

Transpromo.com.au

2008-11-06T03:42:40Z

Australia Post has just launched Transpromo.com.au; a micro-site focused on promoting the value of transpromotional mail. The site includes educational information, assessment surveys, case studies, reports and other resources.

While it's clear that Aussie Post has started this initiative with their own agenda (to drive postal mail volume), the site isn't stuffed with the typical transpromo vendor propaganda currently in circulation—but instead it includes proven case studies and relevant research reports. Definitely worth reviewing.

E-mail Metrics

2008-11-04T10:20:51Z

EmailLabs has pubished some helpful statistics and metrics on e-mail usage. This research includes a wealth of useful data, including the most popular day of the week to send e-mail messages (Tuesday), send times (9 am PST), along with open times and more. It's interesting that Wednesday is "opening day" and results from nearly 48.7% of messages being sent on Tuesday and Wednesday.

What's worth noting is these results prove that relevant campaigns boost performance, with campaigns that target Web site user-clickstream data generate conversion rates that outperform untargeted broadcast campaigns by nearly 4 to 1. Furthermore, the statistics show that only 4 percent of marketers personalised messages. And of marketers who do personalise, 76 percent use five data points or less in the personalisation process.

While some of these published statistics are a few years old now, I believe they're still relevant, as e-mail habits haven't changed a great deal since the survey was published. The research is definitely worth a read before you deploy your next e-mail or cross-media campaign!

Make Me Super

2008-10-26T19:51:12Z

EVB, a digital agency in San Francisco, has put together a viral video campaign for Kodak where you can transform yourself (or someone else) into a "super" person. The site includes an image-editing tool where you can upload a photo of yourself and define the edge of your face. If you're fortunate enough to have a common name, you're name will even be featured as part of a pre-recorded soundtrack. The campaign is very impressive and a great deal of effort (and expense) has gone into the production of the campaign.

It appears the campaign objective is to encourage visitors to buy branded personalised merchandise or "Super Products", which include a mouse mat, mug, apron and more. While I won't be signing up to buy my Super Products just yet, it's certainly a novel approach to web-to-print!

Go ahead and make yourself super at www.makemesuper.com.

Election Fever

2008-10-25T02:30:07Z

Election-mania is sweeping news headlines across the world and a couple of organisations have decided to create election news stories of their own.

The Summit Group are hosting a spoof election coverage news site, where you can transform yourself or a friend into a presidential candidate simply by a entering your name. The site uses Flash video to incorporate a name as a variable element within the video. While it's obvious that significant effort has gone into making this fictional video, the personalisation effects are not too effective, however the campaign gets a good overall chuckle factor.

Another, but somewhat similar second spoof news coverage is available on a fictional news Web site hosted by the democratic policital organisation MoveOn.org. The personalisation effects in this video (which also use Flash variables) are a little more convincing and even more humorous.

Relevant Personalisation

2008-10-18T01:29:53Z

I received an email campaign from a PURL service provider today, inviting me to learn about their new service by visiting a personalised Web site. Curious to learn more, I followed the link to my personalised site. Unfortunately, I was rather disappointed by the whole experience. Firstly, they managed to spell my name incorrectly (in the PURL and on the site) and secondly, the site wasn't relevant to the data they collected on me. But, I'm really not holding that against them, and I'm not going to disclose this particular vendor, I just want to share my story as there are lessons to be learnt from it.

On my personalised website there was an invitation to a cocktail party, which will be held at an upcoming industry event. Unfortunately, I can't attend, so stepped through their survey and selected "I am not attending [tradeshow]". I continued on through the survey pages, updated my name to it's correct spelling, and arrived at the confirmation page, which displayed the message "We look forward to seeing you at the [vendor] Party at [tradeshow]. You will receive an email momentarily with the details."

Needless to say, I was rather underwhelmed by the whole experience. The fact that I had selected that I would not be attending the tradeshow, only to receive a message that they look forward to seeing me there, doesn't really say too much about the capabilities of their solution. And I never received the email they promised me. I'm not sure whether this is just a limitation of their solution; if they're unable to display conditional messages based on data then I suggest it's a pretty significant limitation, but whatever the reason, they should have tested the various scenarios first.

If you're creating a personalised campaign, no matter what media channel you are using, you really need to make sure that the marketing messages support your customer data or the information you collect from them. Then test it. And test again.

Barcode Designs

2008-10-07T12:43:58Z

I really don't like using barcodes in direct mail. I usually try to avoid them. Wherever you place them on the mailer, they disturb the creative and just don't "look good". But sometimes you don't have a choice, like when you're running a redemption campaign where the recipient has to redeem the offer by presenting their mail piece (with a trackable barcode) in-store.

However, as some Japanese designers illustrate this article, with a little imagination, you can have some fun with barcodes and still make them functional!

Thanks to @graphicstart for the tweet!

Westpac Cross-Sell

2008-10-06T01:19:11Z

Westpac, one of Australia's largest banks, ran a direct mail campaign a few years ago to current their cardholders promoting the new Altitude American Express card as a complimentary rewards-earning credit card. If you live in Australia, then you might already be familiar with this award-winning campaign. While this campaign is now somewhat dated, I'd still like to share it as its success was in its relative simplicity.

As the campaign targeted existing cardholders, Westpac could provide comprehensive data on these customers. Westpac leveraged this data together with their existing customer relationship to emphasise the potential rewards of taking up the new card.

The campaign leveraged their existing customer data to provide rewards-based messages. Each mail pack included rule-driven images to show the customer their points potential based on their spending behaviour. A second image would then reveal the kind of reward they could enjoy with twice as many points.

The customer data was also used further customise the packs, by driving variable text that supported the inserted image, and tailored the message around each customer's personal details.

The results were fantastic. Westpac managed to lift response rates from 3.75 percent to 6.64 percent—by mailing the same customers for the third time! What's even more remarkable is that the campaign was a credit card promotion, which by their nature, have one of the lowest effectiveness rates in direct mail. The campaign scooped up a local direct marketing award and its success is now familar across the Australian direct marketing industry.

The campaign was developed by direct marketing agency Lavender and printed by Penfold Buscombe (now part of the Geon Group). The mail piece was personalised using XMPie uDirect Standard, which goes to prove that you don't necessarily need expensive VDP software to develop effective direct mail campaigns!

CRM Data and DM

2008-09-26T05:43:21Z

We're trapped in a paradigm. Many CRM systems offer APIs to enable add-on services, including SalesForce.com with their AppExchange or SugarCRM, a popular open-source CRM solution. And there are many systems integrators and service providers who are already offering integration into these CRM systems using data directly from these CRM systems—but no one appears to be doing this for non-transactional direct marketing campaigns.

There's an irony here. This isn't really a technical limitation—many vendors such as XMPie, Pageflex and others are busy touting support for enterprise-grade database systems including MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2 and others, but no one is integrating direct marketing campaigns directly into their CRM systems, outside of transactional mail (i.e. bills and statements).

If it's technically feasible to extract campaign data from the CRM system at run-time, apply some filtering or parsing functions and feed it directly to VDP composition software, then why isn't anyone doing it? Alas, it appears, direct mail data preparation is still a highly-skilled craft for many which requires a host of data hygiene and preparation steps, including de-duplication, address verification, addition of postal barcodes, data sorting for postal-optimisation rates, data formatting and other menial tasks. But I'd argue that data hygiene should be happening in the CRM system, and not at campaign run-time.

And the problem doesn't stop there. Once you've exported the data from a CRM system, then you have to feed response data back into it. Yes, it's great that anyone can log-in to a MindFire/Pageflex/XMPie-powered personalised Web site and complete a customised survey or respond online, but it becomes stuck in it's little separate database until someone has figured out a way of feeding the data back into the CRM system.

OK, I admit that most direct marketing campaign workflows don't necessarily lend themselves to an integrated CRM approach. In most cases the data resides behind a client firewall in a CRM system, which then has to be extracted and handed off to the service provider. But for clients with web-based SaaS CRM systems, like SalesForce.com, it's quite feasible.

I'd really like to see vendors like XMPie, MindFire Inc and others build integration modules into web-based CRM solutions. With 47,700 SalesForce.com customers, the AppExchange would be a good place to start...

A New Beginning

2008-09-14T21:03:48Z

Today marks the start of new chapter in my life. I left the doors of Fuji Xerox Australia last week and today I start my own consulting company. My new company focuses on information publishing systems, which includes document publishing, variable-data publishing and social publishing workflows. But enough of the shameless plug, this is the last time you'll hear of it here. If you wan't to learn more about my company, check out my Web site at www.eliot.com.au.

Don't worry, it's business as usual on VeeDeePee—I'll still be blogging regularly and keeping a close eye on everything what's hot and what's not in the world of variable-data publishing!

TransPromo's Demise

2008-09-12T16:56:27Z

Vodafone Australia has recently announced that as of October 1 2008, all new and existing customers will be sent their monthly bills by email. Customers without an email address can view their bills online. Vodafone will no longer be sending out paper bills.

This is a significant move from one of the largest mobile providers in Australia. Not only will it impact Computershare who currently print the mobile statements for Vodafone Australia's 4 million customers, but this brave move could also sway other mobile providers to follow suit.

While the value of incorporating TransPromo elements in a full colour printed statements TransPromo are obvious, and Telstra are already incorporating TransPromo in their new bill for their 9.6 million fixed line and 9.3 million mobile subscribers, it seems the opportunity for TransPromo has arrived a little too late for Vodafone.

Maybe the next revolution isn't TransPromo after all. Maybe it's "eTransPromo"; the incorporation of conditional marketing messages and offers on electronic statements.

Transpromo-Live

2008-09-04T17:56:07Z

A new blog dedicated to TransPromo has recently surfaced. Authored by Lee Gallagher, Transpromo-Live provides an open discussion on TransPromo and its potential applications. It's great to see a blogger and knowledge expert who's committed to sharing and educating the market on these emerging applications.

Lee's refreshing commentary moves past the hype and discusses real applications and challenges in transactional promotional printing. Check it out at www.transpromo-live.com.

XMPie on iPhone

2008-08-26T22:22:26Z

Many XMPie users will appreciate the open platform of uProduce (the production engine in PersonalEffect). In fact, the entire uProduce interface is built using the uProduce Web Services API—anything you can do with uProduce can be remotely driven through the API, which means you can even create your own customised uProduce dashboard.

And that's exactly what Application Architect Tim Perrett has done. Hey, why not? Tim's gone and built a mobile uProduce dashboard application for the iPhone (using Objective-C) that controls uProduce directly through the iPhone SDK. This neat little application shows job status, job information and even lets you delete jobs. To see it in action, check out the screencast on Tim's blog.

This iPhone application could be quite a handy application for many XMPie users, like checking job production status while you're on the road. Nice work Tim!

TransPromo Summit

2008-08-24T18:16:03Z

As I wasn't able to convince my boss to send me off on a 20 hour flight to NYC for the annual InfoTrends TransPromo Summit, I've been following the running commentary on Print CEO Blog with interest. Cary Sherburne's last entry on the summit sparked a wave of discussion, including one from the Pat McGrew, Director of Industry Marketing at Kodak and respected TransPromo evangelist. It's interesting to note that Pat observed that the delegate mix was way off-balance, with a strong mix of vendors and not enough users. As a result, there was quite a bit of "preaching to the converted". As I work for a vendor, I guess it's a good job that I didn't turn up and add to the apple cart. If you attended the summit, I'd be keen to feed on takeaways and left-overs. Please feel free to comment and share.