According to the Winterberry Group, direct mail spending will continue to grow in 2015 to a $45.7 billion market, and it is increasingly looked to as a higher impact channel that cuts through the clutter of digital marketing.

There are a couple ways digital has advantages over print, one of them being the ability to personalize and target digital ads. However, as inkjet printing is becoming more common and affordable, that advantage is evaporating.

Inkjet printing enables personalized direct mail pieces through the use of variable data — e.g., name, gender, location, preferred products, buying habits, current stage in the customer journey, etc. With this type of personalization available, marketers can realize the goal of delivering the right message to the right person and at the right time — in print.

The benefit in this is that it’s been proven that personalized marketing messages outperform standard messages:

• Personalized color direct mail was found to generate a 6.5 percent response rate, three times higher than the usual 2 percent response rate that occurs as the result of non-personalized direct mail (Melissa Data).
• When compared to static direct mail pieces, personalized direct mail pieces yielded a 24.5 percent increase in conversion, 31.6 percent overall profit increase, 36 percent increase in response rate, and a 48 percent increase in repeat orders (InfoTrends/Cap Ventures).

Furthermore, inkjet helps brands become “multichannel” through the use of techniques that belong to digital alone, such as personalized URLs and QR codes, which allow inkjet to continue to drive higher response rates in marketing campaigns across channels. This allows you to link print to the web so that content, and your relationships with customers, remains fresh.

“The technology (i.e., inkjet) is there,” says Judith Maloy, director and CEO at Polaris Direct, “to overlay online and POS data with your mail file to create meaningful one-to-one communications with customers through the efficient use of data.”

Done right, technology like this can bring some of the targeting finesse of digital to higher impact, almost universally opened and read, direct mail.

For more ways you can use inkjet printing to increase your ROI, request the “Printing a New Plan for Direct Marketers” whitepaper.

See the original article by Target Marketing here.