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We know where you live - mashing up direct mail

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Eliot is a marketing guy at Fuji Xerox. Prior to his current day job, he worked in the US for Adobe. Eliot holds a couple of degrees in printing and enjoys spending far too much time exploring the world of variable-data printing. In his copious free time Eliot enjoys kayaking, writing, blogging, eating and sleeping.

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While digital printing delivers the ability for every impression (or page) to be different, it also unlocks conventional boundaries and enables other digital technologies to be integrated with print. If you can put it on paper, then you can print it, digitally.

Take mashups, for example. While the term usually refers to web applications that combine data from multiple sources into a single integrated application, there’s no reason why you can’t extend the mashup concept to print. And print providers already are.

A handful of printers are creating printed products from Web 2.0 communities such as MOO, which has integrated with the social networking site Bebo, photo-sharing Web sites Flickr and Fotolog, and virtual worlds Second Life and Habbo, along with various Weblog publishing services. By integrating into these social communities, MOO and others, offer consumers an expanding portfolio of related print products, enabling customers to share their digital content when they are offline and have something tangible that expresses their identity.

But can this type of mashup application be extended to include direct mail?

Absolutely. In fact, there are a number of print providers that already have. Many printers are incorporating customised maps in direct mail campaigns. Take shoe and boot manufacturer, Wolverine, for example. They sent out a DM piece to 50,000 Sears customers a few years ago, offering them a discount on a new Trecker shoe brand. A joint collaboration between marketing service provider Trekk and print provider Yoffi, this partnership was able to leverage simple data that they had on a customer, their name and address, and transform the piece into a highly relevant mail piece which ‘featured’:

  • a personalised name (with supporting cheesy pun)
  • integration to a store locator database, to match the recipient to their address to the nearest Sears store
  • a personalised map, illustrating how to get to from the recipients house to their local Sears store
  • an estimated number of steps that it would take for the recipient to walk to the store

That’s quite a lot of customisation—not bad when you consider the only recipient data available was a customer name and address. While the creative was fairly dry and wasn’t the most imaginative, the campaign delivered results; the shoe quickly became the best seller in it’s category (at Sears) within one week of the mail drop.

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