Digital Printing: Top 5 Best Practices This best practices white paper is excerpted from Digital Printing: Transforming Marketing and Print Management, a look at issues related to digital printing from the buyer s and printer s perspectives. For more information on this report, visit Digital Printing Reports (www.digitalprintingreports.com). HEIDI TOLLIVER-NIGRO www.digitalprintingreports.com
DIGITAL PRINTING: BEST PRACTICES For years, slick, sophisticated marketing programs have been developed largely by big, corporate marketers with deep pockets and seemingly limitless print options. Particularly if you are a small or mid-sized business, you may feel that your print marketing cannot compete. It s too expensive to print high-quality, four-color mailers in run lengths you can afford. It s too expensive to deploy long-term customer retention campaigns and communicate using multiple media channels (such as print, Internet, and SMS text messaging) and more. That used to be true, but things are changing. Just as the Internet has leveled the playing field for small businesses by allowing them to create websites indistinguishable from those of the largest corporations, digital printing has leveled the playing field in terms of the quality and sophistication of print. Not just because it allows marketers to print high-quality, four (plus) -color jobs in extremely short runs economically but because business model changes within the commercial printing industry have brought even the most sophisticated print marketing applications, such as personalized URLs, 1:1 personalization, and Web-based, centralized brand and document management, into the range of smaller budgets. Let s look at what we consider to be the Top 5 best practices for digital printing so you can get the most out of these campaigns. 1. Change document and marketing management models, not just output technology. Digital printing may give you more flexibility to do things like print in fourcolor at the same cost or print smaller volumes at a time, but if that s the only way you capitalize on this technology, you are missing the point. Digital printing is capable of revolutionizing the way you approach your marketing and document management. That doesn t happen merely by incorporating more color or printing in shorter runs. Take the example of HealthNow, a regional affiliate of a national insurance company. Before switching to digitally driven information packets, its information packets were large, often reaching 70 pages each. Not only were these packets time-consuming and expensive to print, but customers often complained that the information was difficult to understand. So the company launched a new approach. It began using digital print production to personalize the guides at the plan level. This alleviated subscriber confusion caused by the inclusion of irrelevant information. Plus, it reduced the size of the packets from 70 to 20 pages. This slashed production costs by 50% 60%. Administrative costs and calls to its service center were reduced, as well. 1
2. Don t think about technology. Think about solutions. The greatest gains in digital print are typically made when doing more than simply printing on demand. They are made by combining applications to create a larger solution. Some of the many types of campaigns digital print is capable of driving are as follows: Short-run printing Versioning Customized marketing collateral with centralized, online control One-off personalized follow-ups Personalized URLs 1:1 print personalization Transactional and transpromotional Web-to-Print Publishing One marketer using this technology with great success is the Baan Company, a provider of B2B commerce solutions. It wanted to reduce costs from obsolete collateral, reduce inventory costs and complexity of management, and improve time to market for document changes and updates. It combined a number of these elements (short-run printing, versioning, and Web-to-print) and transformed the way it managed its documents. Before implementing a digital, print-on-demand workflow, 60% of its brochures were thrown away. By switching to centralized, online on-demand ordering, it now prints on demand and has reduced or eliminated inventory obsolescence. Order handling costs have dropped by 85%. That s why success with digital production isn t in the technology itself. It s what solutions the technology can drive. 3. Traditional marketing rules apply. When marketers begin implementing many of today s digital printing applications, there can be the misperception that the technology (such as personalized URLs, database-driven personalization, or Web-to-print customization) will, in itself, drive response. Not so. This is still marketing and that it is the creative, the marketing message, the offer, the incentive, and the list, among other components, that determine success. 2
4. Think about pricing, not in terms of individual project cost or per-piece cost, but how the project impacts the bottom line. One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make when evaluating digital print applications is thinking too narrowly about short-term investment rather than long-term gain. Or about the initial outlay and not bottom-line growth. In reality, you can spend more on a per-piece basis and end up increasing your margins. Just look at the examples above. The per-piece costs were higher than the marketer was previously paying, but the overall solution resulted in significant cost reduction. In order to evaluate the true impact of switching to digital production models, you need to understand how the total solution impacts your bottom line once all costs are taken into account. This is where understanding things like total return on investment, cost per lead (rather than cost per piece), and cost per response are so critical. 5. Make a long-term commitment. Sometimes the benefits of digital-printing-driven applications are felt right away. Other times, they are accrued over time. Too often, marketers evaluate the value of these campaigns on a short-term basis instead of using the flexibility offered by digital production to test, refine, and optimize programs over time. Marketers who gain the deepest benefits from digital printing are those who have a philosophical commitment to the marketing and document management strategies it drives. They see themselves as making a shift in marketing and document management model that goes beyond a single or even a series of campaigns. The deeper your commitment to this approach to document management and marketing, the more you will benefit from it. This is especially true for 1:1 (personalized) printing and Web-to-print, which have front-end and other development costs. In terms of 1:1 (personalized) printing (including the sub-category of personalized URLs), you will reap the greatest benefits if you test, learn, and tweak campaigns over time. Don t assume that a single campaign is representative of long-term results. Likewise, Web-to-print. Often, marketers invest in these applications but fail to get the full buy-in internally. As a result, their systems get under-utilized and fail to provide the marketer with the full benefits. If the system is deeply underutilized (which happens more often than marketers and print providers like to admit), it may not even achieve payback. 3
Thus, whether it s digitally driven document management, 1:1 printing, or Webto-print a key best practice is long-term commitment. Conclusions The takeaway is that the importance of digital printing to your business has little to do with the technology itself its costs and its output capabilities. It s about transforming how you think about your marketing and changing the way you evaluate the cost-effectiveness and the success of your campaigns. Although all of this starts with digital output, the important thing is not the guts of the machine, but the way it can be combined with other technologies to create broader solutions that make a real difference in your business. For a full list of best practices, see Digital Printing: Transforming Marketing Models and Print Management, part of the Marketer s Primer Series. www.digitalprintingreports.com/digitalprinting.html 4