The goal of any marketing campaign is to reach a specific group of consumers that will lead to a future action, usually a purchase, that benefits the company. In today’s world of constant bombardment of advertisements at every minute of a person’s life it can be quite hard to get your business in front of a customer, let alone get your business even remembered. Luckily there is a very powerful tool available to your business that allows you to stand above the masses – variable data printing (VDP).
VDP allows a business to customize their marketing message to connect with their customer on a personal level – resulting in a far higher chance that their customer will purchase from them. When you utilize VDP, along with being able to customize your message to each individual customer, you’ll also gain a bunch of additional benefits:
- Less work for you
- Support your online marketing efforts
- Tracking
- Increase in ROI
- Brand loyalty
Let’s dive into each of those benefits and explain how VDP will achieve those for you.
Less Work For You
Creating personalized printed material for your customers, while might take more work up front for you – it can potentially save a far bigger amount of time once the customer has received your advertisement. By adding specific information to your printed material; like your address, your phone number, a particular sale, and a lot more, can save you a lot of time from having to answer some of the simpler questions that customers have about your business.
With the ability to customize each individual piece that you are having printed, every single one can be different and offer various information to help each customer.
Supporting Your Online Marketing Efforts
Print and Online marketing goes hand-in-hand and can actually help each other to perform better and capture more of your target audience. If you either have an online marketing campaign or are only sticking to the printed world; a marketing campaign is still just a marketing campaign and no matter what media you’re using to reach your customers, there are certain fundamentals that get measured in the end to learn if the campaign was a success. While online marketing has become incredibly easy and cheap to do, if you’re able to combine online with print, you’re achieving almost maximum effectiveness and it’ll take a lot to have your campaign fail.
Online marketing, as briefly mentioned earlier, is insanely easy to do and quite cheap. With technologies like Google ADs and Facebook, you’re able to target your specific customer based on their likes, their searches, and so much more. The easiest way of showing this is with Google ADs. Let’s say you are in the market looking to buy a new computer. Just after one time of searching for “Computers to buy” Google remembers that and every time you head to a website with Google ADs, you’re almost guaranteed to see an ad about computers. That is the beauty of Google ADs and online marketing – it is seamless and unobtrusive.
With VDP, you can actually do the EXACT same thing. If you keep up with knowing what your customers want, you’ll be able to figure out what to market to them. By doing a marketing push with VDP you can customize every single ad that you send out, knowing which one will go to what customer, to cater that ad towards what they have been looking for (or better yet, what they’ll be looking for in the future). Additionally, something that physical marketing can do that online marketing can’t is that the physical ad that you sent them will always be there in the physical world, it is tangible. What this means is an audience is more likely to spend some time looking at the information you send, be engaged, and respond to the call to action.  And, importantly, once engaged, they will hop over to the digital platform for more information or to place an order. It’s a multi-channel experience.
Tracking
Tracking your marketing campaign is the most important step of the campaign. It is here where you’ll learn if what you’ve worked tirelessly on has any impact for your customers and your business. With VDP you can add individual tracking to each printed material like barcodes or unique coupon codes.
Return on ROI
By adjusting the content (images and/or text) on your direct mail pieces based on the recipients’ interests, location, family status, or any other piece of information you have on your audience, means your direct mail piece will be more appealing and relevant to the recipient.
According to PODi and DMA data, the response rate of non-personalized mail pieces is 2%, and a personalized piece has a response rate of 6%—that’s a 300% increase.
Brand Loyalty
The holy grail of marketing. Through the use of VDP you’ll give your customers a reason to fall in love with your business. You’ll be offering them products and/or services that they truly need, and even potentially anticipating their needs. Through the continued success of using VDP to customize your marketing campaigns to your individual customers, they’ll begin to trust you for everything relating to your product or service and eventually will decide that no matter what, they’ll always be your customer.
As you can see there are many benefits to utilizing VDP in your marketing campaigns to increase business. VDP can be used in almost anything that you can think of; from business cards, to brochures, to booklets, to sales promotions, and a ton more. If you’re interested in learning just how VDP can help you and your business, don’t wait to contact Harlan Graphics and we’ll be glad to work with you on creating the perfect marketing material for you.
