Getting personal: experimenting with personalised print
Personalisation is rapidly becoming big business, but is it worth it? One member of our team, Jayne Golden, made it her mission to find out:
Like most of the country, my first conscious experience of personalised marketing was when Coca Cola launched their ‘Share a Coke’ campaign. Everyone went mad for the personalised bottles and cans that were labelled with the 150 most popular forenames in the UK. Personally, I didn’t go out in search of my namesake bottle, firstly because I don’t drink Coke and secondly because I was pretty certain that I would not find a Jayne spelt with a ‘y’, but I still experienced the excitement and buzz that the campaign created both online and offline and as a result I have a deeper appreciation for Coca Cola being in touch with their target audience and understanding what makes them tick.
Since then I have noticed an increased number of brands using personalised printing, some more successfully than others. I recently went on a Caribbean cruise and after I had booked my holiday with P&O I received a personalised holiday itinerary with my name printed on the cover. I had already purchased and paid for the holiday so I was impressed that they had gone to the extra effort to create a personalised communication. Hanley-Wood Business Media (2013) found that 78% of consumers felt that brands that create unique and personalised content are more interested in building a relationship with them (Hanley-Wood Business Media, 2013).
After my experience with P&O and seeing how successful the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was I thought this is something that would really appeal to our prospective students. So when the opportunity came up to send a direct mail to offer holders around exams I put the idea forward to pilot a personalised printing campaign. Sending a printed communication to students at this time is not something we had tried before so we had much discussion about who it should be sent to, what its purpose is, what it would look like and what it should say.
The target group
We looked at the conversion communications schedule for offer holders and realised that whilst international students receive a number of printed communications throughout the cycle, home offer holders don’t receive anything printed between the Accommodation Guide (which is dispatched a week after the offer letter is sent out) and the Crucial Guide (which is dispatched when they become unconditional firm — for the majority this is after A-level results day). We were also confident that most home students would be following the A-level examination process and could pin point quite accurately when they would start to sit their exams. Therefore we decided to focus the pilot mail out primarily on home offer holders and accepts (CF, CI and CO) with a home status and a UK mailing address. We also identified a small group of international students whose conditional offer is based on A-level or IB results from a UK school and who have a UK mailing address so we were able to include them in the campaign.
The design and content
The message was so targeted and succinct that we decided a postcard would be perfect for the job. Printing the address and the postal mark on the back also meant that we didn’t have to package, address or dispatch them once printed — we could simply drop them in the post, saving time and money.
We wanted to produce a very simple design which focused on the wishing the individual well in their forthcoming exams. We had some discussions within our team about whether the postcard should include links to the website, contact numbers, social media icons, images of the campus, exam tips etc. but I thought it was essential that the student felt the message was sincere and that meant not having any form of call to action. The design was pretty straight forward and we enlisted the help of freelance designer David Webb to put some ideas together.
The print
Once we had established the quantity and style we could look at the cost difference between producing a standard A6 postcard and a personalised version. We approached Entwistle Group (one of our University approved print suppliers) who explained how personalised printing worked and talked us through the entire process, answering any of our many questions along the way. I was totally surprised that the personalised version cost just £140.00 more in total based on our quantities, I was expecting it to be a lot more.
The design required three variable text fields — first name only on the front and first name, surname and address on the back (see image above). We simply provided the printer with the final artwork, identifying the variable text fields with square brackets either side, and a spreadsheet (.csv) with each variable text field in a separate column. They generated the first set of 20 postcards for us to proof and once we were happy that the correct data was in the correct text fields, we were good to go.
The results
The printed postcards were delivered directly to the University post room and just to make sure that the data was correct I took a random sample from a number of boxes and checked them against the original data. Everything was perfect and the postcards looked so good but I still felt sick to the stomach when I authorised them to go in the post!
Within a couple of days they started to arrive on the door mats of 15,045 students across the UK and our social media accounts started to receive posts from happy students showing their appreciation. Everything to date has been extremely positive and we are getting continued interaction on social media. I have learnt so much from doing this project including the complicated world of Campus Solutions data, the process of personalised printing and the popularity of Instagram amongst our target audience, something we are now considering incorporating into our social media strategy.
Originally published at studentcomms.wordpress.com on June 5, 2014.
