Variable Data Printing—Start Me Up!
The excitement
Digital presses provide a tremendous opportunity to support new age marketing
for commercial printers. Organizations have made substantial efforts to collect
information about their customers, with the intent of learning more about
them and putting it to use. But beyond an on-screen CRM (customer relationship
management) review prior to making a call, this information is being vastly
underutilized. With all the data that has been collected, why not put it to
good use developing effective, highly customized marketing campaigns that
garner high interest, generate significant response rates, lower the cost
per lead and pave the way to greater customer retention. A digital press is
the tool, and variable data printing is the enabler.
Customized product brochures, direct mail pieces and attention getting personalized
promotional materials are just a few ways to communicate and create awareness.
This could be used to create marketing programs that help your organization
build and develop customer relationships.
If your marketing department is ordering large quantities of marketing materials
only to find that they have to throw them out because of obsolescence, you
have a big opportunity. Better inventory and waste economies are inherent
in a print-on-demand workflow. I'm not going to spend time belaboring this
point. I think this is well known. But there's a bonus. Add to this the rate
of change of today's information and products because of new technology or
competitive packaging and you have a very compelling argument to print only
what you need, when you need it, as well as to be able to track changing product
specifications and showcase specialized models to targeted market segments.
The November 2002 issue of In-Plant Graphics magazine
focused on the manufacturing industry. These in-plant operations are closely
tied to the core business. They are involved in printing product materials
to support the business. They have exactly what digital press owners are
searching their radar scopes for — repetitive printing for the same application at frequent intervals.
Less is more. With targeted VDP promotional pieces you can get a better
response with similar or less volume resulting in more success, however you
measure it — whether
its interest in a new product, or resultant sales.
Enough of me telling you why you should be in variable data
printing.
Let's discuss what you need to know to get started.
Variable data printing overview
A variable data job has three new ingredients to consider.
- Data — First is the database
report, in the form of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a delimited text
file. Some prior discussion has hopefully taken place to match the data
fields in the database report to the requirements of the copyholes in
the variable data template.
- Business rules — For more
complex variable data jobs some business rules (i.e. conditional logic)
may also be necessary. These can be implemented in the Variable Data Software
that you are using or can be set up in the database report as a discrete
step. This is a matter of your workflow.
- Variable data job template — Then
there is the variable data template, which is nothing more than a static
page that has been marked up to identify where copyholes for the variable
data will be.
Variable data software will then merge all the elements together and compose
a variable data output file. The variable data software can be a plug-in to
an existing program you are familiar with, it can be a standalone desktop
application, or it could run on a server in a more automated scenario. This
software will perform two essential functions. First it will let you mark
up a static page to identify the location and type of the variable data copyholes
(which will be filled as directed by the data file). It will also compose
all the job elements (the static page, the variable data copyholes, the data,
and the business rules) and produce a variable data output file that is ready
to go to press.
Data
Those with direct mailing operations will already have data handling expertise
in-house and be able to support the data handling requirements. Others may
utilize their IT department to perform this task. A frequent concern is the
level of database expertise that is required. Let me address that by saying
that you don't need to be an expert in database management systems. The requirement
for any variable data job is to be able to communicate what data is needed,
what the naming and format conventions are, and to confirm that the data is
available in the first place. Of course, the data needed is governed by the
page design.
The data handling tasks require a cross-knowledge of the graphic
arts page and some expertise with spreadsheets. You will need data manipulation
tools — Excel at the very least, or, for more sophisticated manipulating,
software such as Filemaker Pro or Microsoft Access. These are just a few
examples.
Business rules
How you enter the conditional logic will be a function of the variable data
software solution that you choose. Keep in mind that not all jobs require
this. Business Rules are required when the data file isn't an exact match
to the copyholes and requires some interpretation of the data to make everything
work properly.
Business rule example
A promotional piece will make one of three offers based on what the targeted
reader currently owns.
If the requirement is to also display an image representative of the new
offering, the image generally wouldn't be able to be identified at the time
of the export from the database. The database would be able to identify what
current products are owned and this would be the data field that would be
exported.
A business rule to make this work for the copyhole that contains the promotional
image would look something like this (conceptually):
IF current_product = A use Promo_image1
ELSE
IF current_product = B use Promo_image2
ELSE
use Promo_image3
The method to achieve this will vary based on the software you are using,
but this gives a general idea of the conditional logic for a simple business rule.
Back to Top
|
NexPress
Resources
