Variable data print

Like many things in life, achieving the nirvana of personalised, one-to-one communications has its pain points. As an agency committed to challenging conventions in B2B marketing, we wanted to share with you our experiences, thoughts and best practice over the past 18 months with a view to helping you (client or agency) stimulate responses and enhance relationships with your customers.

Like many new things, we are all still in the early-adopter phase of using personalisation techniques to move us towards “real time targeted marketing”. And as always, it’s a journey that many of us start off slowly before we become used to VDP as the new standard. Fortunately for us, we have HP as a client and they are always keen to break new ground, having a vested interest in moving people from litho to digital print. The following advice may prove useful.

1. Don’t swallow the elephant whole

Selling the sizzle and promise of personalisation is the easy bit. But all your efforts can soon turn to dust if you bite-off more than you can chew with your first project.

The killer is data. Often a sore point in B2B marketing, data quality and integrity is crucial for a successful campaign. While we seem to tolerate some levels of data inaccuracies when printing to litho, an incorrect name spelling can be disastrous when doing a personalisation campaign, especially if the creative is focused on utilising the recipient’s name as a key element of the creative.

We would recommend any planner or suit to run a test project with a client first. Never more than 1000 contacts. Make sure the data is the best you can get your hands on, run some quality checks and simply spend as long as it takes making sure all the data fields are populated properly.

Time spent doing this will be time well spent… I promise you. Your first few VDP campaigns will take longer, might be painful and perhaps even cost more than traditional litho solutions but, remember, the initial learning curve pain will be well worth it in the long run.

2. Get creative involved as soon as possible

This might seem obvious but there can be a tendency for suits and planners to get carried away and initiate projects without first getting the creatives onboard. If you’re serious about VDP, your entire creative department (traditional and interactive) from concept teams to designers through to artworkers and production need to understand the new principles behind VDP.

The best way to achieve this is to partner with a highly experienced VDP such as London Digital and run a series of workshops/presentations. It can be a great way of galvanising your teams and getting them behind something new and exciting. Don’t focus so much on price. Focus on value add. A VDP partner will help you surmount the early hurdles.

3. Find a champion

We would advocate that any agency considering making VDP a strategic differentiator should have a dedicated internal evangelist.

4. Be prepared

Being able to talk to different audiences with tailored content is hugely attractive, so make sure what you have to say is relevant. As agencies, we are responsible for driving the insights that make campaigns live or die. Through personalisation and VDP, planning becomes far more critical as comms, data, media and digital planners interact, developing often complex, trigger-based contact strategies. It’s important to know your limits.

5. Be accountable

In theory, the promise of personalisation and VDP is about improved response rates and cost consolidation. This is great news for agencies who want to stand up and be counted. Not so great for those happy with the status quo. As agencies we need to make sure our creative products are as robust as those we seek to promote. Be mindful that starting the journey of personalisation and VDP is one that will throw up conversations between you and your client about ROI and performance-based payment. The opportunities for those agencies and clients who want to understand the true potential of VDP are enormous and can have significant impact on how you go to market.

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