Feb 12, 2008
What is New in Print/Mail Technology?
I’ve been giving a great deal of thought lately to what is new in print/mail technology. There are two reasons for this: a) I am preparing a presentation for the XPLOR Document University (XDU) at AIIM/On Demand, called “What’s New in Print/Mail Technology,” and, b) I’m preparing a presentation to be given at Mailcom in May called “What’s New in Print/Mail Technology.”
I also made a New Year’s resolution to revive person to person mail, especially for members of the younger generation, and I know that new technology is going to play a major role in making this happen.
If you have a new technology that you’d like me to discuss at On Demand and Mailcom please send me an email. I’m really interested in what is new and exciting in our industry.
The course I’m chairing at XDU is called “Mail in the Middle” and it’s about finding a new role for mail in the enterprise. Mail should no longer be thought of as an isolated business asset; it should be considered the middleware that connects numerous internal and externally-facing processes.
There is a great deal at stake here. Billions of dollars are spent each year across hundreds of channels in an effort to gain the mind share of millions of consumers—and the channel that continues to be among the most effective is mail. Yet corporate executives gripe about the associated costs, in many cases outsource their most valuable channel, and in general don’t see the value that they can glean from postal mail, which is hiding in plain sight right before their very eyes.
At a mail conference that I spoke at last year, with yet another postage hike on the way, the nervousness was palpable in the room when the managers and directors of mail services operations discussed the threat they faced from executives that wanted to outsource their bailywick because it wasn’t core to the business and could be handled at less expense by mail service bureaus..
Not core? Allow me to digress.
A few years ago I organized an interview between a reporter from a major periodical and the CEO of the company I then worked for. The subject was Sarbanes-Oxley, which went into effect that year. I did all the required research and spoke with numerous resources around the company to get a full picture of our story. I briefed the CEO with talking points, none of which he actually needed, and joined him in his conference room to take the call. Within moments it was clear that the reporter had an agenda: that SarbOx was a painful mandate from the bureaucrats in DC and that executives should rage, rage against the dying of the light.
To his credit, the CEO would have none of it. SarbOx was an opportunity to shine a light on business processes and methodologies that were long overdue in their need for reform. It was a chance to improve business practices, perfect the art of accounting, strengthen relationships with stakeholders and was both necessary and welcome.
Not many other executives took that viewpoint, at least not according to the final article, but how wonderful was that opinion? And I’ll tell you that it wasn’t just a case of making lemonade out of lemons, it was the mindset of a great leader: every obstacle is a potential opportunity.
And as I think back on it, every few years you get these events that make you shine that light. Remember Y2K and what it did for IT? But, friends, that light can shine at any time and the time to raise the visibility of the many processes, many of them still accomplished with legacy systems, that go into making the company mail, is long overdue. The billing document is your blood. The mail is the channel that gets the revenue. The way you communicate your story to stakeholders on a monthly or quarterly basis says more about you than your Annual Report. The way you communicate with your customers is what gives your brand a face and a voice and a personality.
Here ends the digression. Because my point is this: organizations that deliver timely, relevant mail communications will differentiate themselves and outperform their competitors.
You have to understand that you have only six seconds to make your pitch. You better make every image, every word and every second count. Undifferentiated, generic messages from your company are ignored and rejected while colorful, relevant, personalized mail gets opened and responded to.
I was at a direct mail service provider just recently—a very innovative comapny—and I saw the future of catalogues. Their philosophy was to do away with the volumes of waste and undifferentiated junk and to focus their efforts based on the best knowledge they had of what the consumer wanted. No more of the old five-inches-thick catalogue with everything in it under the sun. The catalogue of the future has five pages of items you are interested in based on what you already have and what you are looking at online when you browse websites for products. It’s part of a multi-channel approach and much more interactive than traditional catalogues ever were.
Mail that is tailored to the consumer --who they are, what their needs are and that speaks directly to their specific interests and preferences--is far more likely to get their attention in the six seconds they’ll give you and perhaps buy you enough time to generate a response.
Not surprisingly, two-thirds of marketers (67%) say that database analytics that support online marketing efforts are their most pressing need, according to the fifth annual marketing survey done by Alterian, an enterprise marketing company. The survey polled 852 marketers online and in-person in North America and the U.K. in October and November about their priorities for spending and resource allocation in 2008. Sixty-three percent said that increasing marketing effectiveness was the primary objective behind implementing such processes.
But, people, haven’t we been here before? Does anyone remember CRM? Most CRM tools were databases mixed with analytics and segmentation algorithms. But CRM had the dubious distinction of being the first post-Y2K IT projects to utterly fail to deliver value. But the problem wasn’t with the investment in the tools. It was that there were no processes in place to take advantage of them.
Scott Nelson, the very bright CRM guru from Gartner research, once told an audience that only 15% of companies that implemented CRM had tied it to their paper mail processes. Five or six years later, 67% of marketers appear ready to make the same mistake. Smart companies will use database analytics to target more, mail less and get more responses, gaining profit while eliminating junk mail and making consumers more receptive to marketing messages by mail.
What’s new in print/mail technology? Tools that give businesses the ability to create relevent mailed collateral, improve one-to-one communciations with their customers, and improve the content and the timing of every mail piece.
It’s already happening. I was in Las Vegas last week for the PODi Application Forum and I’m pleased to say that, based on what I saw on the exhibit floor, Megaspirea has the one of the most innovative new technology offerings in the industry. It usually takes people a few minutes to recognize that we are not a print technology but once they do you can really see the wheels turning.
This is what drew me to Megaspirea in the first place—the incredible buzz that the Mailliner 100 drew at IPEX 2006. I went to Manchester a consultant and came home an employee. As our technology develops and finds innovators to team it with the necessary tools—software and digital print—we will deliver material value in this industry.