When “variable information direct mail†is fully promoted and applied, it can produce truly massive digital printing tasks!
Digital printing service providers may be inspired by the following facts:
(1) In countries with developed direct mail in Europe and the United States, a direct mail marketing project will use digital presses to print hundreds of thousands to one million personalized postcards or postcards!
(2) Most digital print shops with European facades in the United States and the United States will not purchase top-quality digital printing equipment (such as printers) because the general retail or corporate customers are only responsible for the printing of graphic documents. The overall demand failed to meet the throughput of production equipment stably.
(3) A U.S. digital printing company prints tens of thousands of personalized color marketing materials for a world's top 500 companies each day to meet direct mail usage. It currently owns three Advantech digital presses and is preparing to purchase additional equipment to meet its growing mission. This company is not a chain company, it does not have a store, does not face retail customers, and the equipment is running in a closed working environment. Foreign customers cannot see through the internal working environment such as glass partitions and they are Customer production tasks. Its customers are all major customers, and the tasks they undertake are long-term and permanent orders that are loyal to customers. In fact, similar digital printing service providers specializing in major customers have become increasingly popular in Europe and the United States.
Where are the recent growth points of digital printing?
To increase the sales volume of digital printing, let’s look at the relationship between digital print distribution and the types of service providers in countries with advanced digital printing in Europe and the United States.
Despite the fact that local digital printers keep prices down, the share of alternative digital offset printing operations in North America is still declining, proving that price is not a key factor in promoting the digital printing market and turnover – the real factor is its application area!
A few years ago, many professionals in the printing industry believed that digital printing would take a considerable amount of print and market share from traditional offset printing, but of course this has not yet become a reality! The reason is that the current speed and cost of digital printing are still quite different from traditional offset printing. In conventional ordinary printing operations, it is meaningless to use digital printing instead of traditional offset printing. Therefore, in the short-to-medium term, offset printing is not (and should not be) the target replacement market for digital printing; the core market for true digital printing should be in areas other than offset printing.
In the past we have seen examples of successful digital printing in many unanticipated fields. One of them is the large-scale supermarket chain marked with the price of shopping guide labels, taking Wal-Mart as an example. The price of the same type of products in Shenzhen Wal-Mart may be Different from Wal-Mart in Shanghai and Beijing, the specific contents of these shopping guides are related to the location of the supermarket. Since digital printing machines can satisfy the printing of small-format and personalized labels, such variable content shopping guide labels have created production requirements for digital printing machines.
Another increasingly popular digital printing application is the printing of personalized photo albums, such as Kodak's EasyShare online photo album service, which uses the high-volume Kodak NexPress digital press to print album content for customers. In addition, personalized calendars are similar digital printing applications.
However, digital printing professionals have profound experience: digital printing, color digital simulation, personalized photo books, personalized albums, menus, gifts, etc., digital printing jobs in the niche market, unless it is not through the network To submit print jobs (W2P) and regional coverage of large-scale areas or even cross-border geographic coverage (such as remote printing, iPrint.com company's business, etc.), otherwise manual operations, small-scale digital printing operations or boutique-style Personalized products cannot reach mass or scale production effects! This phenomenon explains why more than 10,000 graphic printing companies can create 60% of North American digital printing revenue, because the real massive digital printing tasks come from major companies' long-term and continuous transaction data related tasks or marketing. Promote projects, and these companies often deliver their sensitive tasks to digital printing companies that specialize in providing specialized data processing and direct mail services for major companies.
Variable information direct mail can stimulate the industrialization of digital printing
In the long run, direct mail with variable information is an application that is expected to have a wider industrial scope. Simulation technology has been serving business letter mail for static content for decades. Today, the format of business letters is constantly multiplying.
Recently, digital printing has made direct mailings more targeted through the imprinting of variable content on printed matter. Finished offsets are usually sent to the data center for variable text such as price, product name, etc., or personal names and greetings are printed using a monochrome or focused color laser printer. Taking extra labor and turnaround time into account can make production costs expensive. In addition, although the accuracy of the collation can be monitored using a bar code control system, the task of completing the personalized print by overprinting the printed matter can easily cause errors in the collation process. Another common type of direct mailing with variable content is a customized booklet with customized mail.
Although the technology of variable data has been in existence for a long time, the global application is still relatively small, but its application is increasingly open, and the usage has gradually become larger and larger, and it is moving toward the cost-effective production scale of digital presses. We now see that in Europe and the United States, the application of comprehensive variable data is accelerating, not only in mailing addresses and greetings, not only in text, but also with color images of specific products. Thanks to the continuous innovation of software and digital presses, the content of e-mails can now go beyond the basic level of customization of the traditional "names and greetings."
Take the automotive promotion mail as an example. In addition to your name and greetings, you will also see a photo of the MiniCoopers car that you saw a few days ago. It contains the specific models and colors that you like. These characteristics are from the car dealership before The data and information you got. The content of today’s letter is no longer merely data. There may be over a thousand variables in individual automobile promotion letters... Including the location of the car dealer you visited, the date of the specific visit, and the body that attracted your model. Colors and internal configuration of the car.
Large-scale supermarket chains such as Jingkelong have used special programs to analyze customers' personal preferences for many years. In recent years, they have used member loyalty cards (a type of customer loyalty card) to motivate members to make repeated purchases. In the next step, Jingkelong Supermarket will allow members to enjoy discounted products in the store at special prices, so as to attract more customers to join the membership and use the membership card. Since then, Jingkelong Supermarket has been able to track consumer purchase patterns for individual direct mail promotions. Professional database companies serving a variety of industries will collect such data from various types of large supermarkets and continue to build and provide manufacturers with regard to consumers' reactions to their products.
In Europe and the United States, casinos are very keen to use digital printing direct mail, targeted to enhance customer loyalty. Example: By sending points cards to all the guests who come to the casino, the turnover of the United States's Foxwood Casino has grown tremendously. The casino uses points cards to give extra points to guests, or give extra offers from them to inspire guests to get this card. Guests are required to register with the card when participating in various gaming games, so that the casino can track the specific games and final wins and losses that these guests participate in. If the guest loses money, the Foxwood Casino may issue them a voucher, inviting them to come back again to receive generous benefits, such as free hotel accommodation or other conditions that make these guests unable to resist being gamblers again. If the guest wins the money, the casino will give them something else - because the guests have more incentive to come back and gamble, the value of this gift may be lower. The Foxwood Casino constantly generates data mining information from visiting guests and is conducting a series of interesting marketing actions.
All is ready except for the opportunity
We have already seen the application of variable information printing begin to appear in different fields. How can these applications be gradually expanded? Given that there is now a huge amount of transaction data printing waiting to be tapped and started, it is clear that only targeted variable data printing may not be effective. Variable information printing already exists and can be used to stimulate recipients to access relevant web pages. Although everything is in the air, it will still take some time for the market to adapt and accept. For this reason, Kodak has realized that these important resources are awaiting excavation, and has established a "transaction data group" to work together with its "graphic and video group" to create greater business opportunities.
However, transaction data printing does not fully represent the application of all digital printers. This is just the beginning of digital press applications. In fact, more and more successful digital printing applications are emerging throughout the world. Digital printing service providers receive data from loyalty cards from customers and use the highest level of advanced software in the market to produce the highest-level, targeted, variable-data direct mail letters, which enables direct mail campaigns to receive ever-higher response rates. Today, the corporate marketing department can obtain a response rate of 15%-40% by spending only RMB 5-10 per direct mail letter. Commercial letters that are generally produced using offset printing usually only attract response rates of 1%-4%.
If a personalized attraction can be added to the envelope, it will effectively increase the response rate of the letter. However, general digital printers cannot print on envelopes. In addition, if people know that some letters contain valuable coupons, they will always open these emails to get their contents. However, such variable direct mail letters involving coupons are usually not placed in envelopes. They consist of folded printed leaflets, such as a three-fold leaflet. This kind of postal seal generated from the folded leaflet is very suitable for commercial letters, and it has also become an enduring application for printing service providers. Currently, such variable information direct mail letters in the United States each charge approximately US$1, while a common offset letter only costs a few cents, bringing significant business opportunities to print service providers and marketing professionals. However, despite this, the mailing of such foldings was still performed intermittently and failed to form enough digital printing volume to create a significant and significant impact on the market. It seems that the application of variable information direct mail will take some time to become popular, and digital presses are not an obstacle to development because they have been able to implement these applications for many years.
Obstacles to data infrastructure
The basic construction of data will take some time to catch up with the application of variable information printing. From the aforementioned cases of car dealers, casinos and supermarkets, we saw the implementation of variable information direct mail. These companies have regularly updated and accurate data, and begin to use this data for marketing and profit-making. Generally speaking, although the data already exists, it will take a while to extensively dig and refine the data. It may take 3-5 years to start at the moment of data acquisition and cultivate these data to form a huge asset and mainstream resources!
Once the general public can receive education in data infrastructure, society will have the opportunity to establish a data infrastructure. Maybe the owner of the grocery store knows everything about data infrastructure, but he doesn't know what to do. General agencies do not have the resources to conduct data mining and refining themselves. Therefore, the market will have some data mining with scale