Secrets of the Catalog Master
Vol. MMVI No. 3 May 2006
(Continued--page 3)
Exciting Advances in Print
by Don Libey
A number of new and innovative ideas are creating even more
savings and efficiencies—as well as higher response rates—in
the world of printing
Digital Individualization
Having returned from the Vermont/New Hampshire Direct Marketing Conference in Manchester, Vermont, hosted by The Orvis Company, several fascinating printing advances were seen and are worthy of exploration.
A company in Portland, Maine, MPX, is a unique provider of a suite of printing and fulfillment services for direct marketers. The website is www.mpxonline.com. The person to speak with is Curtis Roberts, Manager of Business Development, (207) 774 6116 ext. 3323 or cell (207) 233 8729; email: croberts@mpxonline.com.
One of their fascinating print products has increased response rates significantly due to its extreme personalization. Here’s how it works.
A giant post card shows the faces of twelve people on the front, similar to a high school yearbook. The person in the upper left photo is the recipient of the mailing and the variable address and personal information as well as an offer is aimed specifically at that person. People respond to their picture and their name, and this specialized mail piece takes full advantage of that reaction.
MPX is finding highly innovative ways of combining printing with marketing technology, as well as digital individualization. As the online and print worlds continue to converge, every opportunity to individualize and get down to the personalized message for one is essential and must be explored.
Imagine the impact of a catalog cover with a customer pictured on it, or a grandchild; and what level of response would you expect if you received an email with HTML that pictured you or showed you and your last product purchased together.
Take a look at the MPX website and explore their concepts. Ask whether they might have something that will increase awareness and response and be useful in your new customer acquisition, old customer reactivation or customer retention.
Lower Press Operating Costs and Mailing Costs
Here are the latest resounding innovations from our old friends at Quad/Graphics. First, they now can offer variable data for use in catalogs. Quad/Graphics can begin with a pre-printed personalized piece and build a complete catalog around that variable piece and then address and message the outside with specific information for that same person targeted in the variable core. This is Quad/Graphics’ SmartMatch. This has enormous application potential for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer catalog enhancement.
Another innovation (and one Quad/Graphics and I first conceptualized over 20 years ago) is what I call RotoMail. If you think of going to a movie and coming in half way through then sitting through the replay and leaving when you reach the place where you came in, you will have the idea. Think of a gigantic revolving carrier-route sorting table, rotating in front of you with all the various carrier-routes passing by. You enter the ‘pool’ of addresses at some random carrier-route, say at 2 a.m., and begin inserting your catalogs into a giant co-mail with other mailers. When the whole sortation has revolved and you come to the carrier-route you first entered on, you are done at maybe 7 a.m. and you jump off. You’ve just RotoMailed. Quad/Graphics has built huge pools of customers and they can in-line/co-mail/co-bind and mix all of the pools’ mailings in one giant carrier route. As you can imagine, the resulting postage savings could be enormous, and the marketing options for both small and large mailers are staggering.
But that was not enough for Quad. They have come up with a twist. In addition to the multiple catalogs co-binding and co-mailing on the same stitcher, they added their MultiBlend pocket in-line, after the trimmer. This allows them to deposit a pre-bound catalog of a different trim size and have it entered in the giant carrier route sortation, as well.
For significant cost-savings on press charges, Quad/Graphics is phasing out its 32 page presses and replacing them with 64 page presses. If you look at the primary costs in printing, labor (including benefits) is significant. Because of the economies of scale, one 64 page press can produce the output of three 32 page presses and it requires one-third the number of press operators, a 66 percent savings on labor. Again, creating innovation for customer benefit, Quad/Graphics has figured out how to position these 64 page presses as facing, meaning the two consoles for controlling the presses are side-by-side. This allows a six-person crew to operate two 64 page presses. That is a reduction from the thirty people it took to run three 32 page presses which were not facing. Over time, this level of productivity improvement will result in lower overall costs.
Quad/Graphics is doing exciting things, as they always have done. The person to talk with to find out how you can benefit from these innovations and cost-savings is Jim Rudek. Jim’s email is Jim.Rudek@qg.com. His telephone number is (414) 566 2021 in the Sussex, Wisconsin office. I’ve known and worked with Jim and Quad/Graphics going back to the very early 1980s and I am constantly amazed by their creativity, vision, innovation, and unequaled dedication to their customers’ success. There is still a print production frontier to be gained and Quad/Graphics is consistently ahead of that frontier, pulling the catalog world into the future and finding ways to do it better at less cost. You need a company like that on your team. Ask the tough question: “What innovations have my printer created to lower my costs? Just exactly what have they done for me lately?”
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