Ways to personalize direct mail

Good day, Habr!

In today's publication I want to raise the issue of creating a direct mail - personalized letters on the basis of a single template. Such letters are quite often used as an advertising or information channel.

Now we are working on a variant of such a scheme for one of the clients, in which the advertising manager himself could generate a package of ready-to-print / send files using a letter template and a customer base.
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For the formation of the proposal, we considered several options for solving such a problem - in order to be able to compare them in terms of speed, labor costs, functionality. And that's what we did.

So, the source data:

Client: a federal bank. He has his own database of addresses for "paper" distribution (about 20,000 recipients). Frequency of distribution - once a month or more often, depending on advertising activity. The preparation of letters is mainly outsourced to address distribution companies or printing houses. The cost of direct personalization in printing houses is 1-2 rubles per copy. That is, if you prepare all the layouts yourself, you can save 20-40 thousand rubles for each mailing list, or at least 240-480 thousand per year.

Objective: to organize the process of personalizing layouts directly in the bank.

In the Brandmaker system, this task is easily solved with the help of the standard functionality of the Web-to-Print module: a letter template in the InDesign format is created, personalization data is pulled from an ordinary Excel table. At the output, we obtain either individual files in pdf, indd or jpeg format, or a multi-page pdf file or .indd - all of printed quality. Plus, according to the same scheme, you can make an html-template for sending in electronic form.

In general, of course, the scope of Web-to-Print is very wide, so it's not about justifying the economic viability of its implementation, based specifically on the task of creating direct mail. In comparison, we generally do not take into account the issue of the cost of licenses for used software products - in any case, these are one-time costs, and in the long run it is more profitable than paying for the personalization of each mail to outsourcers.

What are the alternatives?

The real ones, of course, and not “put 200 Chinese in the basement so that they manually copy-paste names and surnames from the base”.

We conducted a comparison with two options:

1. Based on Microsoft Word using a standard function that pulls data from an Excel spreadsheet. This option has already been tested previously by the same client. The scheme involves three stages:
• A letter template is being prepared with all graphic elements. On it are printed forms - letter blanks.
• In the Word, another template is made - a stencil of the text, into which all personalized information is pulled
• After the import process from Excel is completed, the resulting file is converted to .pdf and printed on prepared blanks. The second rolling leaves all the text, not just personalized information, in order to avoid problems with violation of text formatting.

Due to the fact that Word is “sharpened” first of all for working with text, templates have to be used as simple as possible - with a minimum of graphics (only a logo, for example).

2. Based on Adobe Photoshop and a similar macro. If the custom field is only one (for example, first and last name), then you can make ready-made layouts for printing or sending. If personalization is more complicated, then, as in the previous case, you will need two rolled print - a template separately, text separately.

Comparative table of options:



Based on this data, the “cheap and cheerful” option is to use a bunch of Word and Excel. It is enough to spend time preparing the macro and setting up the letter template (so that nothing “floats” anywhere when inserting new lines) - and then you can prepare personalized message texts based on it. The main disadvantage of this option is that it can normally generate only simple text messages.

The option using Web-to-Print is also quite fast and much more functional. At least simply because of the level of specialization - after all, it is based on Adobe InDesign - a program specifically designed for the layout of printing layouts, unlike Word. Therefore, there are no problems with the formatting of the text, with the complexity of the layout, the output is files that are completely ready for printing.

Finally, an option using Adobe Photoshop, although better suited for working with complex layouts than Word, personalizes layouts for much longer. Plus, the inability to create multi-page documents also creates inconvenience when working with a large address database.

But in general, the comparison of these three options does not give a complete picture of the solution of the problem. By and large, we took those options that are directly familiar with. However, for sure, specialists working with direct mail are familiar with other solutions - maybe even specialized ones.

Therefore - a question to "knowledgeable people":

What other options can be included in such a comparison? The client’s requirements are essentially two:

1. To make this option cheaper in the long run than to outsource
2. So that it is designed for the average user (not technically advanced, without skills in graphic editors, etc.).

Thanks for attention. I would be very grateful for specific suggestions.