My name is Cathy Bittner, and I'm a business developer at Canon.
Today, I'd like to introduce you to a fantastic presentation
from our latest Canon Future Promotion Forum.
Isla Munro, Managing Director of Dragonfly
presents how brands can maximize the revenues with direct mail.
So some great tips there. Check them out.
Hello, I'm talking to you today about maximizing your direct marketing in print.
The advancement in high speed digital print has delivered brand
new opportunities to creatives who are designing direct mail,
combining both personalization and production flexibility.
Marketers can now integrate printed direct mail
to enhance the performance of their digital marketing channels.
In the next ten minutes, I'm going to talk to you about maximizing
your direct marketing in print from an agency perspective.
The presentation will hopefully give you the insights from our agency
on how to leverage the latest digital printing technology
developments for your next direct marketing campaign.
First off, I'd like to give you a very quick introduction to Dragonfly.
We are a UK and South African based direct marketing agency,
and we've been experts in direct mail for ten years now.
Over our ten years, we have sent out over 2.5 billion mail items,
and that's been everything from letters your traditional letter into an envelope
to parcels containing branded bandanas.
We love absolutely everything about DM.
We love helping our clients grow.
We love testing and innovating.
We love learning. We love the creative flair.
We love paper stocks and inks finishes.
And we love our clients and our suppliers.
But you might be sitting there thinking, what is direct mail?
Well, the craft of direct mail is just like any other marketing channel.
It's about speaking to the right people at the right time with the right message.
There's no surprise, then, that direct mail is the third largest media channel
in the UK after TV and digital,
worth an estimated £1.7 billion annually.
I always like to think of direct mail, which is the mail that you receive through
your letterbox, door drops, inserts that come out of magazines and newspapers
and direct mail packs, just like big brands, are using that as a method.
It's just like how we use it
as individuals to communicate with our friends and our family.
We will have WhatsApp messages we send to people daily to keep in touch.
We'll have emails, we'll have social media platforms
and we'll have birthday cards and thank you cards.
The companies that we're working with, they're doing exactly the same as this,
just on a much bigger level.
It all takes a lot of clever planning.
You've got to make sure that you set your goals,
you target your audience, you use your data cleverly,
you establish the message and the tone of voice.
You communicate your offer.
You create a powerful call to action
and you make sure
the design of what the pack looks like is really on brand. What we will talk about
today is about how direct mail has changed considerably over the years
and the old school spray and pray where people used to send out lots of mail
packs in the hope that one would stick has significantly changed.
And what we're creating sending now is highly targeted and highly personalized mail.
It can be tracked. And what's hugely exciting
is that high speed digital inkjet is really helping to drive this agenda.
We all know that COVID has changed the world,
and it too has brought some positives.
And last year alone, in a recent poll of Printweek readers,
they were asked, "Has the direct mail
you received changed since the start of the pandemic".
Nearly a quarter, 24% said the mailing I receive is more targeted.
So let's talk direct mail.
We're all about engaging the future customer,
and as a DM agency, we work very simply as an extension of our clients.
Team and our suppliers are very much our colleagues.
We work on a brief addressing the objectives, the KPIs,
the learnings that we had from previous campaigns.
We look at previous creative and importantly,
what other media channels will be running alongside this campaign.
We agree a budget and a time scale, and then we present our ideas
back to our client.
Direct mail is all about technology and innovation,
and in the next few slides, I want to address why this is so important right now
and how this presents opportunities for you.
So first off, very, very brief marketing history. In the 1400s,
the printing presses were invented. In the 1800s,
we saw news and newspapers and press come into the market.
In the 1920s was radio adverts.
In the fifties was TV adverts.
In the eighties was database marketing, which in tow brought with it direct mail.
In the nineties was the boom of e-commerce
and the internet. And in the noughties was social media and digital.
And then in the UK in 2018, we saw GDPR,
which really presented an opportunity of what the future meant for mail.
So what we know is that marketing's changed and what we know now
is that we know more than people than ever before.
So the customer of today understands when they're being marketed to,
and whilst they like to buy, they generally don't like to be sold to.
So they like to be in control like never before.
As marketers, we need to respect that and then we need to sell to them.
But this needs to be subtle, targeted and, most importantly, relevant.
The doorstep clutter of the nineties and the early noughties has been replaced
by the clutter of the inbox and direct mail volumes
have fallen by 30% while we are receiving up to 120 emails per day.
As such, it's imperative that we treat our customers as individuals,
making sure we communicate with them on a channel that they want
and giving them messages that are highly relevant.
This is what we call hyper-personalization.
So I've mentioned direct mail volumes of followed by 30% since 1990.
However, this is good news.
I've mentioned the days of yesterday when Spray and Pray was the name of
the direct mail game and large run litho print jobs
were mailed out in the hope that one would stick.
Unpersonalized mail did not deliver.
In fact, dare I say, it gave the industry a bad name
and dare I say the words "junk mail"?
But now, as a Direct Marketing Agency, we are not just chucking stuff out
for the sake of it.
We are delivering crafty and clever marketing and we are working
with our suppliers and our printers who may raise their eyebrows now
and ask why we're mailing less when in fact what we're mailing is smaller,
but way more targeted, and that is what is stacking up in the long run.
A good supplier of ours is now not just judged on the commodity of print,
but on the ROI
and the response of the mail pieces that they're helping us to produce.
Furthermore, the silver lining of COVID means more people are at home,
which means that they've been interacting with mail more than ever.
Interestingly, 57% of people claim that receiving mail
makes them feel more valued.
We can use JIC Mail data, which is the Joint Industry
Committee for Mail, which has been running since 2017,
and measures what people do with their mail in the UK.
It's like Barb and Nielsen do with the TV ratings.
What we found from the Q2 2020
report which covered the first UK national lockdown
is record breaking double digit increases in the effectiveness
of direct mail and door drops. 96% of mail was engaged with.
The average business, mail pack, which is highly personalized
with people's personal information, is seen by 1.16 people.
So think about that for a second.
If you mailed 1,000,000 recipients,
an additional 160,000 people would see that mail pack
just by the nature of it being shared in the home.
Interestingly, 70% of the
UK say that they feel that they received too many emails.
There is a huge, exciting opportunity for us to use mail
as part of that marketing mix
and to really build on that omnichannel success.
The great thing about mail is that it works wonderfully
with email and it drives people to go online.
And what we're constantly wanting to do is close that customer
journey and provide that user experience.
The average lifespan of direct mail piece is 17 days
versus the average life span of an email, which is a mere two seconds.
Whilst email works well for some situations,
there are others where direct mail is much more suited and effective.
Interestingly, 57% of abandoned email addresses are because people feel they've
received too many emails, and within that there is an opportunity to link into mail.
We use direct mail for brochures and catalogs, welcome packs,
bills, statements, loyalties and rewards and reminders, whereas
we can use emails for quick replies on issues and complaints, news
and updates, confirmations, follow up messages or other products and services.
It's reported that 88% of the UK adults are spending 24 hours
every week online. So how much of that time is spent offline?
And remember, the process
of creating a piece of direct mail is very similar to that of email.
Utilizing the right methods,
automating the processes and agreeing SLAs, we can have mail
easily turned around within 24 or 48 hours and on the doormats within 72 hours.
It then has the potential to stay in the house for up to 17 days.
Imagine the potential that has and the impact to your brand.
It's safe to say, then, that print offers hyper-personalized,
customer centric communications.
And because we know more about our target customers than ever before,
this leverage needs to be transformed to relevant communications
and needs to take into account customer behavior and programmatic activity.
For us, it's about the theory of relevance. By creating relevance,
we create a way to engage with the customer. And to create relevance,
We need to understand our target audience.
Possibly the most important aspect of any campaign is the right data.
And with so much available, the trick is finding the best
and most reliable data and then profiling and modeling it to ensure its relevance.
All kinds of new modeling technology are available, cost effective
and can ensure that you're not wasting money targeting people who will never buy.
That's the key word, target the right people
with messages and offers that are appropriate to them.
For us, it's not just about the data, but it's about the creative as well
and how to maximize what print technology we have available.
Variable data technology allows us to take data and create
a different message image, emotion for every individual.
That way, you can make your direct marketing as relevant as possible.
And here are a couple of quick examples of what we've done.
This was for a high-end insurance company in the UK
who use personalization to drive cross-sell across three audiences.
You'll see on this slide here that there's three different individuals
who were all being sent home insurance,
but we were able to upsell to them.
Car insurance, trailer insurance and pony insurance. Each mail pack
was able to provide a different image, a different personalized message
and drive that relevance. From changing it from a standard direct mail pack,
which was higher mail volumes, as you'll see here at 99,832
to lower, more personalized mail volumes of 47,921,
we're able to drive higher results and response rates,
a way better ROI,
and the revenue generated by the company was over double.
A lot of the planning that we do up front in our marketing
campaigns is what pays off in the long run.
Using your data to set up
smart marketing allows you to communicate with your audience,
daily, weekly, monthly. Programmatic mail
also enables you to do that as quickly as possible.
This is an example of a birthday card that we provided for members of the zoo.
Each birthday card included a voucher for them to enjoy
free hot drink or beverage the next time
they visit the cafe. To give the members flexibility,
the voucher was valid for six months. What was very impressive
with this campaign is that we saw an average upsell per member
through the voucher redemption of £21 per person.
So what we know and what I hope you've seen in this presentation
is that you can maximize your direct marketing in print.
As a result of receiving direct mail,
we know that people go on to download something, engage in social media more,
connect with businesses more,
are influenced to make an online purchase, or are driven to online or digital activity.
What we're constantly trying to do is close that customer loop.
We're wanting everything to create an action.
And we know that personalization drives and delivers that relevance,
which delivers our results.
The inkjet capabilities are amazing
and are helping to drive the agenda in our omnichannel marketing campaigns,
and they're allowing us to engage the future customer via print.
Thank you very, very much for your time just now.
If you've got any questions, I would be very delighted to answer them.
Thank you.