We make the process simple. True variable digital campaigns require 7 essential elements:
1) A Client with Vision – This is You!
Great campaigns start with bright and confident clients – clients with a vision. The vision may come from any number of sources, but when the vision comes, the bright client recognizes it as an opportunity and the confident client is willing to seize that opportunity. Only when that happens can a legendary marketing campaign be launched. These clients are typically the genius behind innovation. These clients push to meet their marketing objectives more powerfully, more efficiently and more effectively.
2) A professional team of creative direct marketers
Variable digital graphics open up a whole new world for designers, but no technology yet invented will compensate for good old American, roll up your sleeves, salesmanship. The creative team in the digital world has to understand how the data interfaces with each message, the needs of the recipient, and the relevancy of the message, as well as all the nuances of the digital process.
In other words – “You still have to craft a message persuasive enough to close the deal” – all the principles of direct marketing need to be implemented and then variable digital becomes the tool to pull it all together.
3) Database understanding and capacity
There are three essential considerations for effectively working with a database in digital marketing.
1) The first consideration is the accuracy of the name and address – List hygiene is the term used to describe cleaning up bad names and addresses in a database. We employ all the latest tools to maximize the accuracy of your data. We have also developed a proprietary verification process utilizing our exclusive national database which has proven to increase data accuracy by over 22%.
2) The second consideration is the appropriateness of the prospect you have targeted. – Is Jon Doe really a 45-year-old married man, making $78,000 a year and living in a condo, or is he a broke bachelor living in a van down by the river? And by the way, does he really want to buy a subscription to Women’s Day? – We offer data appending to increase your options of who to target and how, plus we can help craft the messages and graphics to maximize their appeal to your prospect.
3) The third consideration is to profile your list to find those with a higher tendency of responding to your message. Typically your list will not have an indicator that tells you which of all your prospects will be the most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Merrell Remington has utilized a proprietary database screening tool to take a database and score it by response and purchase propensity. Once your data is scored, you are free to select your target households by any of 20 ranks of response likelihood.
4) Creative/data marriage – the creative genius
Once you get past the three previous mundane but necessary steps to delivering the most comprehensive data possible, you gotta look at the data.
A – Graphic-driven data: This data allows you to select what pictures, fonts and colors will best get the attention while you present a general offer. This is the attention-getting data that lets you write a prospect’s name in the sand or shave the name out of the shaving cream on a beautiful woman’s leg.
B – Message-driven data: This is the relevancy use of the data, letting you select the most persuasive pictures, the offers that best apply to your prospect, it even lets you select the product to offer or which benefit this particular product meets for a particular prospect.
C - Getting Personal data: This is personal account information such as interest rates, account balances, purchase histories, and other like information. This becomes a genuine personal communication where you talk one on one with details.
5) Production capacity
A significant advantage of the Digital Studio is our ability to manage all production workflows through our in-house production system. Because we handle the entire process through production and fulfillment there are considerable cost savings.
The Digital Studio is a digital print facility. It is powered by state of the art software programs and leading-edge Xerox and Canon technology. Our proprietary software programs and data management systems are designed to take full advantage of all the variable print capabilities available to digital production.
6) Fulfillment of produced pieces
The fulfillment center for the Digital Studio was designed to provide product and literature fulfillment to compliment our individual client’s needs. Whether the needs are to mail a generic product to a mass audience or to send out a customized piece to a very specific group, we make it easy.
Without an experienced mail service team, the full capacity of digital production can be limited. We believe that if we can think it up, we can figure out how to get it in the hands of your prospects. We are not limited by size or shape – we’ve mailed boxes, tubes, bags, cans, tool boxes and even pieces of wood.
In addition to the production and fulfillment, we boast a state-of-the-art photography service for studio photography or location shoots. Our photography clients include Mrs. Fields Cookies, TCBY, SoftIce, Pretzelmaker, Sam’s Club and The National Forest Service, to name a few.
7) Follow-up capacity
Because the answer to “How did it work?” is ever important to us, we have refined our tracking skills to be no less honed than any of our other skills. Before any project starts, we develop a tracking procedure to provide the hard numbers as to the success of any of our clients’ marketing efforts, whether they be digital or not. Results are delivered electronically each morning for some of our clients, others only want an outline at the end of a campaign, while other clients are provided detailed weekly charts that break down results by every audience, demographic and region. With the right response information, brilliant marketing decisions are easy to come by. |
