It’s the dead of winter. The cold days and long nights are getting you down. You have still have a few days of leave to use up before Christmas and, at the back of your mind, you would love to escape somewhere faraway and warm like last year. Only this time, you’ve been too busy to sort anything out.

Lo and behold, a postcard from a travel company drops through your door. But it’s not just any postcard – this one has your name on, a picture of the resort you went last year and a link to a personalised URL (PURL). At the PURL, you are asked where you might like to go this year. You click on the Caribbean, and within seconds the website updates to show you top offers to Antigua, Barbados and Cuba.

Thanks to Celerity Communications (part of Dartford-based Howard Hunt Group), Tui Travel’s The Adventure Company is now able to talk to its customers in just this way.

The idea of personalising numerous parts of the same mailer, linking it to a PURL or SMS, and in doing so potentially generating the production of further print or online material, isn’t particularly new. But greater capture techniques are allowing marketers to run better targeted and more highly personalised campaigns than ever before. And, as the results show, clever personalisation can really pay off.

Prior to working with Celerity, Tui sent its customers a generic brochure annually that would typically generate a 0.5% response rate. Thanks to the personalised mailer, the response rate is now 18.75%. The return on investment, meanwhile, is a staggering 290%.

"Compared to the ROIs we get through traditional media, 290% is just out of this world," says Howard Hunt Group assistant managing director Lucy Edwards. "Rather than detract from print, it’s this sort of cross-media activity that makes print more powerful."

Complementary technologies
ProCo marketing manager Clare Knox agrees that cross-media isn’t about replacing the more traditional channels with all things online. She says it’s about recognising that the more traditional forms of marketing production have grown up, become more sophisticated and now sit alongside, rather than battle against, their online counterparts.

But the old-fashioned principles of what makes a good campaign still apply. The message still has to be right and the campaign has to be well executed.

"Some campaigns fail because they focus too much on the medium and overlook the message," says Knox. "The execution has to be spot-on as well – that includes the quality of print, meeting deadlines and sticking to budget," she adds.

Most important of all, say providers, is that a cross-media campaign is only as good as the data it’s based on, and the secret to improving the data is to learn from what the end-customer tells you. "It’s about looking at customers as people rather than as transactions and listening to what they want," says Edwards. "All the information received should be going back onto the database, so it’s a continuous loop."

With such a loop in place, it makes sense to view campaigns as ongoing as they can only get better over time. This process of data enrichment is a bit like turning milk into cream, says Aldridge Print Group managing director Robert Aldridge. "At the beginning, a client will more often than not give us a poor database. Imagine it to receiving a couple of litres of semi-skimmed milk. Our task is to turn it into full-fat milk, and then to cream, clotted cream, and so on. You end up with less, but it’s a far richer substance than the one you started with."

According to Aldridge, the use of PURLs and ‘click-throughs’ to PURLs from broadcast emails has significantly enhanced the ability to extract more information from the end-user.

"A few well-crafted questions online can go a long way to making a more pertinent follow-up campaign," he says.

Despite all of its technological advances, some providers argue the growth of cross-media marketing has been held back by the recession. They say marketers, working with restricted budgets, have been fearful of taking that initial leap of faith and moving away from more traditional channels.

This shouldn’t be the case, argues Jeremy Walters, managing director of Dialogue Solutions – part of the Lateral Group – PrintWeek’s 2010 Cross-Media Company of the Year. "Today’s climate is ideal for cross-media campaigns. Think about it, although overall advertising spend has fallen, below-the-line advertising, which cross-media campaigns effectively are, has actually increased. Money has shifted from above-the-line advertising," he says.

The reason for the shift, says Walters, is that below-the-line advertising is measurable. "In other words, direct marketing can give accountability. Yes, the recession has affected volumes, but it hasn’t affected the appeal of that particular market and because of that, print is holding up," he adds.

Given the current opportunity, Walters believes too many firms are afraid to develop cross-media channels. "I appreciate there are many great printers out there who stick purely to print production, and they do it very well, so I wouldn’t want to offend them," he says.

"All I’m saying is that the whole direct marketing industry should learn that direct marketing is not just about one channel. And I wouldn’t limit that accusation to printers – I’m talking about email providers as well."

Conversely, some printers stand accused of saying they are cross-media companies when they are not. "I went to an exhibition last month, and one company had ‘cross-media marketing’ written all over its stand," says Simon Gray, sales and marketing director at Cross Media Communications. "I asked them what types of media they used, and they said email campaigns. Well, that’s not cross-media – that’s just sending emails out."

A broad church
Gray believes that for a company to truly call itself a cross-media provider, it needs to remove itself from having any bias over one from of communication against another. "The trap of some printers who offer cross-media communications is that they have presses to fill, so they find it difficult to offer impartial advice," he says. "That’s why we are independent to Printflow – the print side of our company."

For firms who consider themselves truly cross-media, the future is only likely to herald more sophisticated channels of data capture. Providers believe QR codes, for instance, will really take-off in the next 12 months, while social media sites such as Facebook will play an ever-greater role.

There is already a sense, however, that these rapidly expanding channels of communication are encouraging some marketers to take personalisation too far, and in doing so only serving to alienate the end-customer. After all, who would be comfortable about receiving a mailer from a paint company with a picture of their own front door in a different colour? Or an email that detailed the last groceries they bought and exactly when and where they bought them from?

"I think some companies become too clever with the information at their disposal," says Walters. "It ultimately ends up being counter-productive and slightly Big Brother-like."

The secret, says Walters, is to let the consumer make their own connections between what they want and what they are being offered. "That involves being subtle. For example, offering coupons for a similar product you know they have bought before, only without telling them that you know they’ve bought it before."

Cross-media clearly isn’t without its challenges, but get the business model right and understand the processes involved, and there’s every chance it could prove an extremely lucrative part of any printer’s business. And the profits, perhaps, can go towards a well-earned holiday.

CASE STUDY: PROCO AND EXPLOSIVE MARKETING





In 2008, Nigel Botterill and Mark Creaser were two frustrated entrepreneurs unable to find a printer that could help them get their restaurant loyalty scheme up and running. That was before Sheffield-based ProCo stepped in.

Two years and one bespoke campaign management system later, ProCo has helped Explosive Marketing become an established loyalty scheme that restaurants use to reward frequent diners through timely emails, mailers and text messages.

To control data and workflow, ProCo built two databases – one to capture restaurant details and one to capture all of the customer information. Each restaurant has the option of choosing offers for their customers. The offers can centre on anything from birthdays or anniversaries to people moving to a new area. In addition, a points-based scheme awards customers at a level determined by each restaurant. Everything is monitored by bespoke data reports.

To keep operational costs to a minimum, all print is produced on ProCo’s HP Indigo presses. All postcard campaigns are produced from a single data file, which is then processed through DirectSmile workflow, where multiple variable templates pull in and populate the hundreds of areas of personalisation and dynamic content. This allows ProCo to sort the whole file to gain the best postage discounts. It also means there is only one print run.

"Without ProCo we would not have a business, says Explosive Marketing sales and marketing director Mark Creaser. "We sell the front-end and they deliver all of the operational activity. They also develop and run all of the data insight that provides me with information to help me drive the business forward and help our customers become more profitable."