Claerhout nv Communication House recently met with acclaim for our Pimenta personalised calendar. We won the Golden Benelux POD award in the “Promotion” category. The annual POD (Printing On Demand) awards reward the creative and effective use of digital and personalised pointing techniques and are organised by the professional publications Graficus, Prepress, Publish, Grafisch Nieuws/Nouvelles Graphiques and M&C Publishing.
Data collection
Efficient personalisation starts with obtaining the right information. We went about making our personalised Pimenta calendar in the following manner: all clients were invited to a festive event in SMAK, where they were photographed individually. 3 “best moments” could be entered with a date (e.g. birthday) and accompanying picture via a personal log-in on a web page. The visual material could be uploaded or sent. This gave us a data base with names, important data (birthdays, etc) and photos that would later be included in the personalised calendar. The personalisation could not begin until the data base was perfect as mistakes (data, spelling...) would be totally unacceptable to the person receiving the calendar.
Know your client
One of the success factors in each form of communication is the efficient identification and processing of your target group. How better to go about this than by approaching each separate individual from the target group personally? Impossible, you say? Not with the right technology! Personalising printed material and other messages gives an air of quality while still being affordable.
It has become a way of thinking and acting which involves other communication channels such as internet and e-mail. We call this customer relations marketing. Even if personalised messages are a little bit more expensive, the higher degree of response soon makes up for this. We have been convinced of this individual approach for a long time at Claerhout nv Communication House and have invested in innovative tools in order to communicate successfully on a one-to-one level.
Knowledge is power
A biblical quotation literally says that whoever knows the name of a person has a sort of power over that person. Consider this yourself: whenever you see your name stated clearly, correctly and in several places on a commercial message, you immediately feel more appealed to and involved. According to Direct Marketing guru, professor Siegfried Vögele seeing your own name on a folder or cover is one of the strongest attention and response generators in existence.
The figures speak for themselves
When Xerox, who manufactures digital printing technology, did research into the effect of personalisation, they came up with a few surprising conclusions. A folder in the form of a personal dialogue that began with the name of the addressee and went on to mention their name a few more times throughout the text and the concrete offer before showing a photo of the sender at the end, generated up to 500% more response than an impersonal folder!
Everything is possible
A reliable database is of crucial importance. From the moment that you have the correct details, names and/or images, you can start practising personalised communication. In the meantime you can supplement these details with other relevant information, both personal and professional, to bring the world of real customer relation marketing within your reach.
We can use our digital press to create an arsenal of personalised communication tools for you ranging from classical sales letters, folders and membership cards to invitations and information concerning a broader range of interests for your clients. We invent new forms of personalised communication everyday, especially since our Golden POD Award gave us even more motivation.
For more information please ask for our brochure.