Increase Sales Using Variable Data Printing

Companies today begin to see the importance of collecting and managing customer data. Managers analyse these data to provide insights to customer behaviour. But more than just providing intelligence, why not use customer databases to directly get in touch with your customers? Insurance companies are known to send birthday cards to their clients but with a customer database at hand, you can do it to!

Variable data printing refers to printing using a database to print text, graphics or images that differs from one piece to the next. In essence, we can combine customer database analysis with variable data printing, to automate printing process to produce higher response rates. Here are some ways you can employ variable data printing in your business.

1. Greeting Cards / Birthday Cards

A Birthday Card with your customer's
name attracts more attention.

Restaurants can send out birthday cards together with a birthday voucher to entice them to celebrate their birthdays at your restaurant. As customers celebrate their birthdays with their friends and family in your restaurant, you can expect them to enjoy your food and service, thus becoming your loyal customers. You can automate the process using database management combined with variable data printing to send out birthday cards to your customers every two weeks.

Doctors / dentists can use greeting cards to remind their patients to go for their annual health check up.

2. Customized Newsletters

Knowing the interests of your customers, you can provide customized newsletters to each individual based on their interests. For example, if you run a private car dealership, you can tailor make the newsletter to the individual. What this means is that Japanese car lovers won't have to read about Continental cards if they aren't interested in them. Likewise, continental car lovers won't be able to see Japanese cards in their newsletter. Each newsletter is thus truly created for the individual.

3. Discount Vouchers

More widely used by international supermarket chains, discount vouchers are tailored to the individual to ensure relevance to their customers, thus increasing response rates.

Another example of the use of variable data printing with discount vouchers could be a travel agency, knowing the budget of their customer, generate and send offers that are of reasonable price to each customer every holiday season. Travel agencies can also use variable data printing to send relevant information to each individual. For example, knowing that a customer is into extreme sports, a travel agent could customize discount vouchers with relevant information about a certain country to pique the interest of the customer.

Conclusion

In essence, variable data printing is a method used to generate relevant data to your prospects. Instead of sending general flyers to a large audience and hope it will be relevant, variable data printing allows you to choose and send individualised mailers, be it reports or newsletters or greetings cards that are more relevant to them. While many marketing e-mails today end up in the spam folder due to strong spam filters, a relevant and personally addressed letter is more likely to be read by the intended recipient.

If you'd like to employ variable data printing, feel free to drop me an email and I'd be happy to show you how you can use it as part of your marketing efforts.