Nov 13, 2007
From Print to Mail
The question asked in the first series of these articles was, are we crazy to build direct mail pieces? The answer to that question is no, we aren’t crazy. Direct mail can be difficult but it works.
Sure, the need to run tests over and over again is time-consuming; sure, the realization of your creative imagery as rendered in toner or ink on paper is hard work; sure, collaborating with large teams has its drawbacks; sure, reliance on others is never easy and communicating clearly within the group can be fraught with difficulty; and, sure, the response rates may not be what you were hoping for. For sure.
It’s still the best communication channel for businesses that need to reach customers. Done well, it’s the most efficient and effective channel we have. So, no, we aren’t crazy. We’re just a little meshuga.
The premise of this column is that, because of all of the above, we as an industry need to look for ways to reduce complexity and make the mail creation process more efficient.
As we’ve seen, postage is expensive (estimated to be 70% of the total cost of a mailing). But complaining about postage costs is a little like complaining about the weather. The best thing to do is eliminate the bad name and address data that creates undeliverable mail, clean and standardize the database to qualify for postage discounts, segment and target your mailings with as much granularity as possible, eliminate impersonal “junk” mail to the greatest extent possible, and make every piece count.
Designing a direct mail piece is deceptively difficult, with numerous considerations to balance: toner or ink coverage, color quality, bleed, chip outs, where to put postal marks and other bar codes and control marks, etc., getting the message across as cleverly and neatly as possible, eliminating the need for elaborate set-up times for equipment, etc.
So here we are in late July: the Graph Expo mailing has a great design (on both the letter page and the envelopes), thanks to Prinova’s excellent design team. We’ve segmented the recipients into marketing, executives and operations and designed a package for each of them. We’ve added personalization on the envelope page and inside on the letter of introduction. Postage evidencing is going to be taken care of via Pitney Bowes PSI. The space that they will need for bar codes has been incorporated into the design. PSI will help us with CASS certification. The envelopes have been test-run through their sorters and have passed all tests with flying colors.
Now it’s time for our print partner, Kodak GCG, to test the application. They have made a deal on our behalf with Glatfelter to get the rolls of paper we need (at a discount!). The paper is tested and the print looks good on it (don’t under-estimate the importance of the right paper). So Kodak sends us a sample about thirty feet long for our review: we’re looking to see that it’s correctly oriented two-up, north/south; that it has either long or short cue marks that indicate to our Mailliner 100 that the following page is either a letter page or the envelope page; we look at the color…OK, the color needs work.
The red in the red ocean is too pink and the hands on one of the envelopes is less flesh-colored than pink (it looked more pig than human). The blue ocean wasn’t quite cerulean enough. So we got on a conference call with Prinova and Kodak and they talked through the CMYK scales and made some adjustments. Kodak prints again and this time we’ve got the colors just right. In fact the pieces we get look great. We give the go ahead. We’re going to print.
Every time we make a change to the print stream it has cost us another week (remember that we’re all working remotely—it’s probably easier to do all this when you’re in a single site). But the Kodak crew in Dayton, Ohio does great work and a few days later we get two rolls of printed paper in our shop.
It’s taken longer than I originally thought it would, given how far ahead we were back in May. But this is the reality: getting print on paper is not easy to do. Design, print and postage are all difficult and expensive components of making mail. So how about finishing?
This is where having a Mailliner 100 comes in handy.
I’ve visited dozens of mailers and they all say the same thing: automate, automate, automate. The best way to ensure maximum productivity is to keep the fingers away from the process. Nowhere is this more important than in mail finishing.
Simply put, traditional inserting is the most error-prone part of the print-to-mail process. The envelopes have to be bought and received way in advance and are warehoused in boxes. Inserts, if any, are also pre-printed, shipped and stored. There are boxes everywhere. Apparently, it’s not unusual for the wrong boxes to arrive at the right time. Or the right boxes arrive at the wrong time. Or the job is late coming off the printers and the boxes need to be set aside until later. And the inserter needs to be set-up for this particular job.
I don’t have to deal with any of that because of Dynamic Envelope Creation. All I need is the roll of printed paper. No boxes, no pre-manufactured envelopes. There’s nothing to stage. The mail is picked up by Prinova within a day of our receiving the printed rolls.
Improved performance centers on eliminating variability. Every box of envelopes, every stack of printed material to be inserted, every set up that needs to be coordinated serves to erode performance. Or as a very astute mail service provider once told me: reduce complexity, simplify the process, make content the only variable.
In addition, the practice of applying labels to envelopes or addressing them through other methods is time-consuming and ineffective. Window envelopes provide a solution by eliminating the need to address the envelope, but they tend to be more expensive and it’s not always easy to get the name and address in the right spot or keep it there (hence the need for the infamous “jog test”).
Dynamic Envelope Creation eliminates these variables and most of the complexity by automating the finishing process. All our operator had to do was load the roll onto the Mailliner and put the envelopes in mail trays for PSI to pick up.
Dynamic Envelope Creation enables mailers to consolidate all the elements onto a single roll of paper: the control document, any inserts (other than a reply card or envelope, if necessary), and the envelope itself. There’s no need to pre-order, nothing to warehouse, nothing to forklift down to the shop floor. Human interaction is limited to loading the roll on one end and traying the content for mailing on the other.
Kemal Carr, the president of Madison Advisors, wrote an analytical assessment of the “hidden costs” of traditional inserting. “Hidden” because these data points are not generally captured by mail operations managers due to the assumption that there was no alternative, which caused them to write it off as a “cost of doing business.”
But there is an alternative now and those hitherto hidden costs are unacceptably high: $.0082 just for acquisition, holding, usage and obsolescence. Add to that the cost of an envelope (often with a more expensive glassine window to simplify the process) and you’ll see that the traditional process is expensive, inefficient, fragmented and complex, which adds cost to every envelope.
The advantage of our Mailliner 100 technology is its capability of uniting previously fragmented approaches in order to drive greater efficiencies. Remember our mantra: reduce complexity, simplify the process, make content the only variable. Where in the process can we streamline workflow, increase efficiency, make the mail piece more effective and lower the cost per piece?
The mailing for Graph Expo was processed quickly and efficiently and inducted into the mail stream on time. Dynamic Envelope Creation saved the day. Mazel tov.
And we’re all a little less crazy for it.
Next week: the impact of On-the-Envelope Messaging.