Time to embrace emerging market, communication techniques

This is because of the dynamic technological advances of the age, coupled with a more sophisticated clientele and more sophisticated consumers. The trick for businesses today is finding the right print service provider with which to partner so that they can reap the rewards.

Criteria for choosing a print partner

It sounds fairly straightforward, but what criteria should matter to you when choosing a print partner?

First of all, the print service provider must offer the right services. Today, this means not only litho or digital abilities with some expert finishing or service delivery, it also means offering variable data expertise and cross-media solutions tailored specifically to your clients' needs.

What is variable data printing? In short, it is personalised, printed material but done in huge volumes at very low costs to the client. It's this newfound technology and print merge that allows clients to personalise each printed item on a print run for a specific client or consumer. Short-run printing at the price of long-run printing.

This offers businesses hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands in savings, plus a well-documented highly effective new tool for reaching old or new customers. It enables marketers to achieve better results than traditional printing methods - with smaller budgets and with better return on investment (ROI).

Variable data printing

The basic form of variable data printing sees a company personalise some text in a print item for greater impact: as in the mail merge of days gone by. However, the more sophisticated, and more beneficial, solution that offers far greater ROI is the personalisation of text and images.

However, cross-media as a tool goes a leap further to take the personalised message platform into a synergistic marketing campaign through email, print, the web, and SMS services. This provides the marketer for today's technology with an enviable arsenal of personalised message to bulk databases in an integrated and measurable campaign.

To be effective, the integration of cross-media campaigns to a proven process is absolutely critical or you risk annoying the customer and derailing the brand. Cross-media, properly done, fully exploits customer data to generate a personal message in a measurable channel that will favourably promote the brand and its message.

Results are measurable

And the results, as with any good corporate project, are measurable. That's something not many marketers can claim about their other projects.

However, as good as these new advances sound and as simple as it may first appear - after all everyone's sent an email, an SMS, created a web page, and printed a piece of paper - it is complex and, without experience of how best to achieve the desired business results, the entire process simply becomes a cost exercise. And these days marketers lose their jobs for less.

You have to be sure that your print service provider offers these technologies and has the right experience in the industry - specifically delivering these business solutions to be worth their promises made. Check for case studies and some contactable references before you engage in cross-media or personalisation and put your brand on the line in the hands of the ill-equipped or inexperienced.