Understand databases for personalized direct marketing and variable data printing

All forms of one-to-one marketing require information about customers and their interests, first to identify those who are likely to be interested in the product or service being offered, and then to personalize the promotion in ways that are likely to be attractive. to each client.

This information may already exist within the client company, as a result of sales calls, customer surveys and other market research, or may have been disclosed during prior transactions, or may be purchased from business data providers. To support an effective personalized marketing campaign, data must be relevant and complete.

Analysis of credit card purchases could indicate that a customer has children and regularly shops at a particular children’s clothing store, for example. The card company could use that information to build loyalty by offering discounts on children’s clothing or toys. As long as customers feel that the offers they receive are appropriate and useful, they will be happy that the information collected about them is used for their benefit.

There is a delicate balance that marketers must maintain between collecting information about customers and giving the impression that they are being spied on. There are also legal restrictions on what data can be collected and how it can be used. These vary by country, even within the EU, and it is the laws of the country in which the recipient is located that generally apply. It is the responsibility of the ‘publisher’, who is usually the printer’s client, to ensure that these laws are followed, but printers planning to maintain or develop databases for their clients should be aware.

Customer information is stored in a database, which could be simply an Excel spreadsheet, a desktop application like FileMaker Pro, a larger corporate resource like those from Oracle or SAP, or a customer relationship management system. the customer (CRM). Data can be entered manually or from other computerized operations, such as call centers, websites, field service, or sales activities.

The databases are made up of records, one per customer, containing fields corresponding to individual data elements such as first and last name, address elements, telephone or email, age, gender, previous purchases, and any other information that may be useful. to select customer types. . Product information can also be stored in a database: A car dealer may maintain a database that lists the cars in its inventory, along with the model, year, and features of each. Relational databases allow you to establish links between pieces of information in different fields and records, allowing you to match vehicle types to customers in the car dealership example.

Images can also be stored in a dedicated database, often known as a digital asset management (DAM) system, which can be automatically queried at print document assembly time, or simply placed in a folder that the database can refer to.

It is not essential that the printer have a database application, as the client information required for a VDP job can be exported from the database in the form of a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, where each record is separated by a return line and field values ​​are separated by commas. These can be opened in Excel, in most word processors, or taken directly into the VDP authoring software. In Excel, each row represents a record and each column is a field. Printers who do not wish to manage databases themselves must indicate which fields are required and specify how the data is to be delivered.

In simple VDP applications, each record may include only the recipient’s name and address, but the more graphically rich marketing documents made possible by digital printing may also include a selection of images that are relevant to different customers. The most sophisticated creation software can combine images and variable text in visually stunning ways, such as inserting a client’s name into an image in a photorealistic way, to generate custom images on the fly, and then combine them with the template according to the business rules that they specify what variable content to use and where to place it in the document. These rules, which are written or programmed in the VDP authoring application, use conditional formatting to select text and image content based on information in the database.

The designers who create the design templates used to generate the pages containing the variable data may be in-house, at an outside agency, or within the client’s organization. Wherever they are, it’s important that they understand how this works and design with variable content in mind, whether they use desktop publishing or word processing software or dedicated VDP/cross-media authoring tools.

The information in the fields of the database records is used to fill placeholders in the template, so the designer must know what they are and take into account how much the content will vary, although more sophisticated software will handle not only the flow of text but also the placement of the image. and climb too. Some solutions can even vary the number of pages depending on the content.

For printers new to VDP, even starting with simple jobs will improve your offer to existing customers, as well as help attract new ones. The sophistication of VDP projects undertaken can naturally grow as the printer’s database skills and VDP experience develop.