Many people would be glad to receive a piece of personalised direct mail from their favourite clothes store. Consumers happily sign up to receive details of the latest offers or new product ranges. However, not quite so many would be so pleased to find the bright, glossy mailer is promoting the very same dress or suit they bought just the week before.

While current technology, in theory, means the possibilities of creating print specific to an individual are virtually limitless, the success, or failure, of a personalised campaign can still hinge on the smallest of details. Everything from the software package you choose to the market you operate in has an impact on whether getting up close and personal works or not.

Perils of personalisation
Today’s market offers an abundance of software packages, from simple mail-merge tools all the way up to multichannel direct marketing systems. The primary motivation for any printer looking to offer personalisation should be to find software that’s appropriate to the needs of customers, not the other way round.

"Put simplistically, printers should be asking themselves what their target customer wants," explains Douglas Gibson, managing director of software provider Infigo. "Once that’s understood, it’s then a case of working out whether they have the internal processes and people to be able to manage those expectations."

Sefas Innovation managing director Giles Hill suggests printers should ask software providers for a "proof of concept" before making any investment.

"I think that’s quite fundamental," he says. "Software providers may be able to dazzle you with a swanky live demo, but the true test of a product will come when you give them some data and ask them to produce something."

Gibson says he has spoken to a number of print company bosses who are keen to offer personalisation, but are put off because they don’t feel comfortable about their sales teams being able to sell it. "It’s essential team leaders provide resources and comfort to their sales teams so they can understand how it works and how it can benefit the business," he suggests.

The same principle should apply to IT: any software application you are going to invest in has to be met with equal investment in getting operators to understand it, otherwise that software may wind up sitting there unused.

Entry level
Infigo recently launched an entry-level variable data printing tool that Gibson says gives printers everything they need to create their own template – without the help of a graphic designer or a web programmer. "There are a couple of software products in the marketplace around the £1,000-£1,500 mark that will easily do as good a job as some of the high-end products," he says.

While finding the right level of software for your business matters, it’s worth nothing without the right data to populate it.
Communisis has been a pioneer of personalisation for a number of years and uses a variety of software packages when creating marketing and transactional pages. According to group digital manager Andrew Lydiatt, what really drives the ?business is the level of insight it is able to provide.

"Yes, we’ve got some very clever and integrated software, but none of that would be any good if we didn’t have the data and the intelligent support services to understand that data," says Lydiatt. "That’s why we acquired data services business AI Data Intelligence last year."

Lydiatt believes personalisation is driven by insight gained from the data, and any software and systems that may be in place simply allow that insight to be put to use.

In a number of cases, it’s the clients themselves who hold the most sophisticated data and insight – large retailers that run loyalty card schemes being an obvious example. Thanks to the growth of the internet, brands are also constantly developing more ways of capturing customer data, and therefore insight, through viral and cross-media campaigns.

The DM sector has, of course, benefitted hugely from the growth of personalisation. A well-targeted personalised DM campaign will, almost without exception, receive a higher response rate than a non-personalised equivalent.

However, the potential benefit of personalising any DM campaign should always be weighed up against the extra time and money needed to produce it, particularly so when very quick turnarounds of newly designed documents are required.
As a general rule of thumb, Direct Smile managing director Neil Bather believes the higher the value of the product in question, the greater reward a highly personalised product will bring.

"By adding a high level of personalisation to a document, you should be looking to potentially double your response rates," says Bather. "Now, if the client is selling widgets then that’s not going to add up to much, but if they are selling houses, and the campaign means they sell two houses instead of one, then it becomes a much bigger deal."

Despite this, Bather feels every project should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. "The client needs to be told the payment budget and the level of extra work that needs to go in to produce a personalised mailer," he says. "They need to understand that it may not always be worth the extra time and effort to personalise a document when a generic brochure will suffice."

Losing impact
So, in some cases, is there a tendency for personalisation to be overused? While acknowledging digital is the most effective type of print for personalisation, Jeremy Walters, managing director at Dialogue Solutions, a division of Lateral Group, cautions that it’s also the kind of print through which a message may be more easily lost than other, more traditional types of print.

"This can happen when personalisation is either overused by companies or has a generic introduction, leading to recipients becoming disinterested and potentially disengaged as a result," he explains.

The other main area where personalisation has taken off is transactional and transpromo statements. In theory, you would expect that a structured and stable statement document would present less of a challenge than a bespoke DM piece, but in reality it can be every bit as difficult.

"With transpromo, I think it’s important to maintain the integrity, honesty and trust that transactional documents offer customers, and therefore not being too aggressive in the marketing," says Sefas’ Hill. "You have to use the appropriate space correctly – for instance, not dumping a 20% off voucher next to a statement of similar products that are listed at their full price."

Another perceived challenge when personalising statements is a lack of flexibility. Whereas a DM campaign can be pulled at the last minute if a marketing team have second thoughts or it doesn’t look the way they wanted it to, a statement doesn’t have that luxury – it still has to go out.

Thankfully, the rise of high-speed digital colour print production now means printers are able to add personalised content to transactional documents much closer to the time they are despatched.

"All of our transactional customers are now talking to us about dropping messages on at the latest possible time," says Lydiatt.  "Not long ago, you probably needed to know three months in advance what that offer or message would be, because you would have probably been pre-printing the base stationery that was going to be used in a templated fashion."

Lydiatt says its HP T300 inkjet web press has enabled Communisis to be much more flexible. "Our customers are looking to be as relevant as possible on their statements," he claims. "If a bank is able to, say, use the white spare to carry messages pertaining to a local branch, then their customers will appreciate the connection."

Inkjet technology has also enabled variable data to be added to statements after the main print run has finished.
"Adding inkjet equipment to their existing processes allows printers to fulfil post-printing variable data requirements in whichever form they require," says Vlad Sljapic, European sales director at Domino. "That can be something as simple as a number or promotional code up to pre-personalised order forms or addressing."

As print integrates more and more with the online environment, personalisation is set to become ever-more sophisticated. Bather at Direct Smile says interest in business-to-consumer personalisation is at an all-time high, while cross-media – combining print with viral and SMS campaigns – is where most of the growth is.

"By providing a marketing service, printers are realising that there is a great opportunity in taking a larger slice of the pie from the customer," he says.

"You can break it down into three main parts," claims Lydiatt. "You need the software that builds the pages and that needs to be robust and flexible. You need the full colour output that the devices can produce. And finally, you need the relationship with the customer and the insight into what their objectives are."

And if you don’t take up the opportunity, you can guarantee that someone else will. But the trick is making personalisation pay for you and your clients.