5 Ways to Get Smarter About Print
Heinrich Marketing
5 Ways to Get Smarter About Print
Beneath all the hype about social media, mobile marketing and the implosion of the magazine and newspaper industry, we still need print in the mix to connect with all our customers and prospects. Marketers are using print differently today — not only to cut printing, paper and mailing costs, but also to leverage the advantages print offers over digital channels.
“The Direct Marketing Association recently reported that the vast majority of people prefer to get most of their communication, especially about new products, in print,” says Debbie Roth, vice president of sales & marketing at Japs Olson printing in St Louis Park, Minn. “Paper is more personal and tactile than digital marketing. It has a permanence to it. Email is a one-shot deal – once it’s yesterday, it’s gone.”
The best response typically comes from a multi-channel direct marketing approach, and print is a vital component of multi-channel marketing. It’s getting faster and cheaper via technology such as digital prepress and inline formats that come off the press ready to go in the mail. Yet the way to include direct mail in your strategy is to know your options for cutting printing costs and boosting response and ROI. “While it’s not rocket science,” says Roth, “it’s so easy to get ingrained in your ways and forget some of these.”
1. Ask about your printer’s in-house inventory of paper stock. “These are the papers they buy in bulk,” Roth explains, “so you can save on those because they get volume discounts.”
2. Reevaluate paper weight. See-through wasn’t the look you were going for, you say? Look again. “The quality and appearance of lighter weight papers has been improving,” says Roth. “I’m starting to see a lot more affordable, lighter weight or commodity paper that’s gotten whiter with improved reflectance. Take advantage of that.” If you’re doing a large-run self mailer, for example, you may want to consider using a lighter paper than you’d normally use; talk to your vendor about which lighter papers will still meet your other requirements.
3. Consult your printer early in the creative process. “For one, not every printing press is the same; reducing the size of your print piece by a quarter inch can make a big difference in cost of paper, printing and postage,” Roth points out. “Secondly, you need to know the most efficient format for your printer to receive your creative. Quark is no longer the mainstay file format; it’s becoming InDesign or PDF, which lets us do prepress so much more quickly and works very, very well. It can cut production time by a few days in some cases. But you’ve got to be set up for it from the get-go.”
4. Take advantage of increased control over color. “People respond to color,” Roth observes. “With high-impact pieces like the ones Heinrich is well known for, smart use of color can really make your direct mail piece stand out.” Because color is so effective, the last few years have brought marketers far more color flexibility and control in the print world. “Now we have presses that print up to 16 colors. The cost of plates has also gone down, which helps clients add more color yet maintain the integrity of their designs.”
5. Consider comingling. Without doing a thing on your side, you can reduce your postage costs and mailing time significantly. If your project is direct mail, you should start asking up front about how to bring your postage costs down. Beyond data hygiene and NCOA (National Change of Address) list cleanup, ask whether the new comingling service applies to your project. Comingling means combining your project with another company’s project in the mail sorting stream to get additional bulk-mail or Sectional Center Facility postal savings – this is called a postal lift.
One final note, about eco: Roth says more and more Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified papers are coming on the market at no added expense (at least for sheet-fed printing). “The FSC logo lets people know that the paper you used was produced in an eco and socially responsible way — not just in how the forest is managed, but also how the materials and end product are handled by every company that touches them, all the way through to the printer.”
Look for more on FSC certification in next month’s Heinrich Report.