VDP Supplement: Keeping Mail Relevant
A POPULAR credit card company’s advertising campaign wants to know: “What’s in Your Wallet?”
Well, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has asked a number of questions along the lines of “What’s in your mailbox?”
And some of those answers are providing powerful tools that will be of benefit to the partnership circle of the USPS, the printer and the direct marketer.
David Mastervich, account management sales specialist with the headquarters sales group for the USPS, will deliver the keynote address on keeping mail relevant at next month’s PIA/GATF Variable Data & Personalization Conference. With a plethora of tools designed to make the mailing process most effective and armed with some surprising data on who’s not only opening mail but utilizing it, Mastervich believes the variable data revolution will enable the mail stream to maintain its relevancy—and allow the mail to increase its effectiveness.
The keynote will be broken into four segments: Relevancy of mail, what customers do with mail, “intelligent mail” barcode tech- nology and address management service products.
Relevancy of Mail
“If consumers don’t find relevancy in the mail that they receive, they have a tendency of discarding it,” Mastervich says. “So we have to make sure that we’re sending the right message to the right people at the right time. Then it becomes relevant to consumers, and that will help grow the direct mail medium. If we don’t do that, we’ll become like other mass marketers and become ignored.”
The beauty of direct mail in the context of variable data printing (VDP) is the sophistication of databases that interpret the information in order to develop a marketing plan that is more personalized— literally allowing mailers to deliver a message that is unique on a house-by-house basis, if so desired.
The technology of digital printing has made mail more powerful, according to Mastervich, who points to case studies detailing how companies are doing very good customer segmentation and driving more profitability and higher revenues by targeting the right recipients with the right messages. And what is really drawing in more VDP clients is the dwindling cost of variable data printing and the affordability of gathering customer data, which carries a much higher response rate than non-targeted direct mail campaigns.
What Customers Do with Mail
How do (end users) handle mail? When do they look at it and how much time do they spend with it?
Those are some of the questions Mastervich will pose to attendees. The USPS has commissioned about a dozen research initiatives through third-party experts in the field of direct marketing, including Baltimore-based Vertis. The research gets at the heart of what becomes with the mail when the recipient takes it from the mailbox to the house.
Among the findings: mail recipients sort the mail they receive, figuratively as well as physically, deciding what each piece means to them. Perhaps the piece is set aside for periodic response (utility bills), or maybe it provides immediate entertainment (catalog) or is a product they may want to look over for later use (travel guide).
“We’ve mapped out the uses of the mail in the customer’s brain and how they use it, so we can better target that,” Mastervich notes.
One of the most eye-popping statistics the research has yielded involves the so-called indifference of Generation X and Y members to printed materials in the electronic and Internet age. An impressive 64 percent of Xs and Ys use mailed coupons, debunking the myth that mail is lost (figuratively) on the younger generations.
Barcode Technology
One of the tools to the path of “intelligent mail” is 4-State Customer Barcode (4CB) technology. What 4CB does is uniquely identify the sender and the mailpiece, provides a destination ZIP code for sortation and routing, and encodes Special Service indicators and Address Change Service (ACS) requests.
Among the benefits of 4CB: A suite of services using a single code, freeing up mailpiece “real estate.” Users can mix and match multiple services within the same mailing group, and it enables access to OneCode Confirm and OneCode ACS services. It can provide uniqueness for up to a billion mailpieces and relates all services back to one unique customer ID.
A major advantage to the 4CB is that it keeps costs down for both mailers and the USPS with improved automation.
“The post office is helping mailers understand where the mail is, how it’s moving through the system and how they can integrate their marketing programs with the delivery of mail by knowing when it’s going to be delivered,” Mastervich says. “The buzz word today is integrated marketing, and people can see mail work within that approach.
“We’re taking barcodes to the finest level that we can in terms of making them so intelligent that there’s embedded information for marketers and we’ll help them track their mail pieces through the postal system, if they want to go that far.”
Address Management Service Products
Roughly 12 percent of addresses that the USPS encounters has some kind of problem. He will highlight some of the 44 mailing solutions offered by the USPS. They include:
• Address Element Correction (AEC), which scans every address in the user’s file and ensures that each part is accurate.
• Delivery Point Validation, which helps refine a user’s list by ensuring that a house exists at a given address.
• National Change of Address (NCOA) Link, a valuable tool for updating movers. According to Mastervich, 14.7 percent of Americans move each year, which can be a huge (and costly) chunk out of a data file.
Mastervich and the USPS are bullish on the future of direct mail, pointing to a survey by research analyst Robert Cohen that forecasts continued yearly growth in the 5 percent to 6 percent range.
“We think it has a lot to do with the idea that variable data printing is sending the right messages, and consumers are reacting to it positively.”|||
- People:
- David Mastervich