Case Study February 2008

A manufacturer announces its open house with lyrical, fall-themed personalized mailers

The Total Mailing System, West Deptford, N.J., wanted to showcase its new 4-color digital capabilities with a unique invitation to its open house. The vibrantly colored, fall-themed invitation was personalized with recipients’ names and nicknames and included a sound chip that played music when opened. It won the manufacturer more than $100,000 in new billings and industry awards from The Philadelphia Direct Marketing Association.

When The Total Mailing System held an open house in 2005 to showcase its new 4-color, variable data capabilities thanks to the recent installation of a Xerox iGen3, Jim Capanna, Total Marketing’s manager of business development, knew that the manufacturer couldn’t produce just any invite.

“Self-promotional pieces are really not what we do,” Capanna says. “In the past, if we wanted to advertise our services we’d use more point-of-purchase stuff. This was definitely a first for us.”

But the West Deptford, N.J.-based company had to produce an invite that played to its strengths and incorporated the company’s unique color, data management and personalization capabilities. For more than 25 years, Total Mailing has specialized in direct mail and data management, producing mostly digitally printed pieces for trade clients. “We work with commercial printers, print brokers and agencies,” he says. “We do 99.9 percent with the trade only, but we’re willing to work with end users as long as there isn’t a conflict of interest.”

Most of their digital pieces were in black and white but now they could work in 4-color.

Capanna knew that Total Mailing wanted to hold its open house in the fall. “It’s my favorite time of the year, so it only seemed appropriate to go with a fall theme for the mailer,” he says.

Total Mailing contacted Albert Fried-Cassorla, president of Fried-Cassorla Communications Inc., Melrose Park, Pa., to design the pieces that would include a pictorial of maple trees near a waterfront setting. Capanna says Total Mailing also decided to include voice chip technology that they purchased with the help of a promotional products distributor.

“I love music so we took a sound byte from The Zombies’ ‘Time of the Season’ for our sound chip,” he says.

The pieces were personalized using three fields of data— nicknames, full names, and business names and addresses—from Total Mailing’s customer and prospect database. “For example, if we were sending one to me. My name is James Capanna but I go by Jim,” he says. “We would have our greeting say ‘Hi, Jim!’ using my nickname, but we’d use my full name with the mailing address. All the information would be linked together in our database. You have to have intimate knowledge of your customers for these types of things to really be successful.”

Though Total Mailing had to use some offline bindery for the installation of the sound chip, “the piece was almost 100 percent produced on the iGen,” Capanna says.

The company topped off the pieces by inserting them into matching fall-color envelopes and stamps that included leaf images.

Capanna says the response to the VDP pieces were outstanding. Out of 750 pieces mailed, 100 percent of recipients responded by either email, through the company web site or by telephone. In addition, 25 percent RSVP’d to attend the open house.

“Two colleagues came to us afterward to say their son or daughter still had our mailing taped to their wall because they liked it so much,” he says.

Capanna estimates that the direct mail campaign and the open house cost Total Mailing about $30,000 in total, but it led to more than $100,000 in new billings for 2006. The piece also resulted in two awards: a Benny Award and an honorable mention from Philadelphia Direct Marketing Association.

He said he would do the program again, “if I could see the benefit to our customers. I mean, I loved doing it, but it was very stressful for me, as my family can attest to,” Capanna says with a chuckle. “It was one of the most stress-filled six months of my life.”

Another 1-to-1 Marketing Campaign
Though The Total Marketing System, West Deptford, N.J., included an elaborate design and voice chip technology in its personalized mailers to capture the attention of recipients, other companies have kept the design of their marketing pieces much simpler but produced similar response rates with the help of personalized URLS (pURLs.)

In February, Lewis Creative Technologies, a graphics communications provider based in Richmond, Va., held an open house. The company sent personalized direct-mail piece containing pURLs to almost 1,500 customers, prospects, suppliers, and partners inviting them to attend customer education seminars as well as see the innovative printed products the company could produce on its new Xerox iGen3 presses. The pURLs took each recipient to a landing page where they could RSVP for the open house. The data gathered through the online registration was used to create badges for attendees.

“We were gathering names in the background,” says Keith Bax, Lewis Creative Technologies vice president of marketing and business development.

The manufacturer received a 31 percent response rate to the mailing and more than 280 people attended the event. “I think people were definitely intrigued by the personalized URLs,” Bax says.

LaShell Stratton is a former assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to editors@printsolutionsmag.com.

When It’s the Time of the Season