"Dear [FIRST NAME]." We’ve all received personalized direct mail and email that fails to hit the intended mark. Poor preparation, bad design, unsuccessful data cleansing, and dull personalized fields lead to ineffective variable data publishing (VDP).
Fortunately, available VDP software solutions range from entry-level mail merge to sophisticated integrated systems, equipped with features that ensure a powerful message.
Product functionally, scalability, pricing, accessibility, and service all help differentiate an entry-level VDP product from a top-of-the-line solution, each offering its own benefits. A boxed, turnkey desktop application provides independence from a provider. A mid-range Software as a Service (SaaS) solution eliminates the need for a dedicated IT team. High-end solutions require dedicated staff, but the functionality knows no limitations.
Pricing models range from free trial versions to multiple licenses that incorporate service fees. It’s difficult to compare and contrast products based on pricing alone, since the range is so broad. The best way to narrow down providers is to list current and future needs and recognize a realistic price commitment. Most VDP solutions are offered as boxed products, a few offer SaaS options, and others are strictly SaaS. A wide variety of price structures are also available.
While it is difficult to break down solutions into cost structures, we divided functionality into three categories—entry-, mid-, and high-level.
Accomplishing Marketing Success
The worldwide VDP solution market for graphic arts applications was $67 million in 2007, states the Global & North American Print Production Workflow Software Market Forecast: 2007-2012, by research firm InfoTrends. This number is expected to reach $161 million in 2012, a growth fueled by price declines in digital color pages and wider adoption of personalized and multi-channel marketing methods.
VDP utilizes customer and recipient data to create a unique marketing message, resulting in communications that feature customized text and graphics including maps, offers, and product details specially tailored to the customer.
"Market dynamics change rapidly, and technology advancements offer new and exciting opportunities for marketers to connect with their target audiences," says Moe Farsheed, CEO, MindFireInc. He says impactful campaigns are relevant and personalized. "VDP enables mass personalization, and thus it is deemed a necessity by savvy marketers," he adds.
The use of personalized graphics creates added stimulation to capture the attention of the indented audience. "Images are powerful—they are literally worth a thousand words. Print service providers (PSPs) and marketing service providers who recognize this can use personalized images to deliver what we call the ‘smile factor’ to perform a very critical function—interrupting the recipient so that the message can be delivered," says Edward J. Ickowski, director, sales and business development, DirectSmile.
The Best of Both Worlds: Mid
Between basic and full functionality, mid-level solutions provide a median for those that do not have the resources to manage and support a full set of features, but do require more than basic VDP integration. With these solutions, users can incorporate modules that are not typically offered in entry-level products, including image personalization, personalized URLs (pURLs), and multi-channel delivery. Often, solutions that begin by serving mid-range VDP needs scale to suit high-end VDP environments.
Bitstream’s Pageflex provides a flexible, scalable platform to meet the demands of a broad spectrum of variable data projects, regardless of the media used to deliver them. Pageflex supports a wide variety of printed materials including direct mail, business cards, signage, packaging, and custom books. Users can extend a campaign to include pURLs, microsites, and HTML email.
In addition, Pageflex offers its Campaign Manager solution, which simplifies the process of sending a coordinated, multi-channel campaign. Pageflex and Pageflex Campaign Manager are designed to also support the VDP needs of high-end users.
Gluon Hyper Matrix is a sophisticated VDP solution with a HyperScale resizing capability suitable for multi-target ad production. The solution is equipped with HyperTemplate for the easy creation of intelligent templates from QuarkXPress documents. HyperMatrix comes with HyperRender, which is also suited for general-purpose W2P.
interlinkONE allows users to publish information across different media types using unique marketing data. The solution automatically generates VDP items as soon as a recipient hits "submit" on a landing page/marketing response form.
Lytrod Software offers a variety of scalable solutions, including Proform Designer SI, Desktop Designer, and GraphicArts VI Designer. Lytrod Software Designer Suite generates personalized documents and business forms for Xerox Variable Data Intelligent PostScript Printware (VIPP) and legacy environments. Lytrod Software’s innovative solutions extend to support high-end, high-volume VDP environments while preserving the means to utilize and enhance legacy form resources. These products are offered both out-of-the-box and SaaS.
Meadows Publishing Solutions offers DesignMerge Pro, which begins by meeting the needs of mid-level VDP production through high-end VDP production. The DesignMerge Professional Bundle is a suite of software modules for Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress, Mac or Windows, that provide sophisticated mail merge, variable data printing, and document assembly features.
Supporting all levels of design and production, Online Print Solutions (OPS) offers VPrint as part of its entire suite W2P solutions that provide users with a powerful VDP engine. VPrint offers a complete delivery mechanism to empower personalized communications, integration into data vendors for list purchasing, and advanced data rule capabilities to share the power of VDP with the user. The OPS VPrint module is able to create an entire VDP job and impose advanced data rules shared on both the customer and administrative ends. Customers build VDP jobs from the front end of the system—complete with list purchasing and advanced data rules. Items such as text, images, and backgrounds are swapped based upon set criteria. Output files into VDP formats including optimized PDF and PPML. Vprint also extends into cross-media communications when coupled with the OPS VWeb module, which supports email blasts, Web landing pages, SMS, and PURLs.
For those looking to experience cross-channel marketing with mid-level VDP support, XMPie offers PersonalEffect E-Media, a server solution for creating and delivering personalized Web sites and email messages. The solution leverages Adobe CS4 and includes XMPie’s uProduce Marketing Console for campaign tracking and analysis. The response URL (RURL) Wizard and Templates feature tools and templates for easy creation of personalized URLs and email messages. PersonalEffect E-Media is also equipped with XMPie’s desktop tools for creating personalized print pieces.
Integrated Success: High
Modern media and communications force new trends into the VDP space. Multi-channel output now extends beyond the traditional print and Web channels to reach customers through social media networks, email, and mobile devices. High-end solutions incorporate multi-channel delivery, tracking, and analytics.
Campaigns that span across print and electronic channels and incorporate tracking systems to check ROI are often referred to as campaign management solutions. "Campaign management has clearly increased the demand for VDP and provided a new tracking method that previously eluded print," notes Jared Graffam, marketing coordinator, Printable Technologies Inc.
"Campaign management is the golden key that unlocks the real potential of VDP," says Aaron Tavakoli, production manager, InSite Solutions, Eastman Kodak Company. He explains that data is everything, and successful capture, merging, cleansing, and targeting is where campaigns are either made or broken. "The real value for service providers lies in everything that happens before composition," he adds.
Setting goals and measuring the effectiveness of a company’s overall marketing strategy and deliverables is top priority, says Bill Parker, CMO, GMC Software Technology. "According to the CMO Council’s 2009 Outlook, 48 percent of 650 marketers surveyed have a senior mandate to grow or retain market share, while 61 percent say that setting clear goals and tracking deliverables is a key strategy for improving efficiency," he continues. "On the other hand, according to the TNS Media Intelligence, 44 percent of marketers polled blame a lack of suitable metrics to measure the impact of their marketing campaigns and 34 percent say they lack technology as well," shares Parker.
VDP campaign management includes success measurement while garnering information for future marketing. "Our customers expand their marketing reach through multi-channel campaigns and immediately prove the value of their efforts through tracking response rates and customer behavior from a campaign management dashboard. They also use campaign management software to collect vital information from customers that can be used to make the next campaign even more effective and variable," notes Marion Williams-Bennett, marketing specialist, Pageflex, Bitstream Inc.
DirectSmile Cross Media is a tool for creating pURL Web sites, personalized emails, and customer interaction via the Internet. In addition, users track campaign response and measure any customer Web activity. The integrated concept allows users to combine print and Web channels, use personalized images in all media, and integrate variable documents, with one solution.
GMC Solutions, including PrintNet Designer, enables the rapid creation of complex personalized documents for TransPromo, direct marketing, on demand publishing, customer correspondence, and transactional applications. PrintNet Designer 6.0 also contains a number of new enhancements and features that improve and extend the product’s functionality in the areas of color management and the repurposing of legacy print streams as well as improvements in proofing and pre-flight.
HP SmartStream Director provides small to large PSPs with an integrated and open, end-to-end workflow solution based on industry standards such as the Job Definition Format (JDF). The product includes a suite of tools that enable jobs to be efficiently managed at virtually every step from creation to fulfillment.
Kodak KODAK DARWIN VDP Software converts Adobe InDesign documents into VDP documents, where all elements—text, graphics, colors, layout, charts, background, and even entire pages are dynamic. Capable of handling extremely large databases and creating complex, effective one-to-one marketing campaigns, without the need for scripting/programming. A powerful JavaScript engine is available for more complex options. Users can design, author, and manage full-color personalized reports, invitations, statements, brochures, booklets, and more.
L2’s Fuse is a cross-channel integration solution that provides email delivery, dynamic Web sites, data collection sites, print collateral, VDP, workflow and campaign automation, response tracking, W2P automation, and geo-tagging.
MindFireInc provides technology that enables print and marketing service providers to create data and graphically driven, customized landing pages and pURLs that integrate with direct mail or other marketing materials. The company's Web-based software allows PSPs to create campaigns that employ variable text, image, video, and flash to personalize the message based on profile attributes of customer or prospect databases.
Printable Technologies, Inc.’s offerings include FusionPro Desktop, FusionPro Direct, and FusionPro Server. FusionPro Desktop is priced at $599. A boxed solution, FusionPro Desktop, is available in both Mac and Windows platforms and is compatible with PDFs created from any graphic design software. The solution has direct plug-ins for both Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress.
FusionPro Direct is a plug-and-play VDP composition server that supports daily production tasks for service providers who routinely compose large record-set or complex VDP jobs. FusionPro Direct is a locally installed, server-based solution that provides VDP designers on a local network with the ability to submit composition requests directly from the FusionPro Desktop product.
FusionPro Server helps users create and manage large-scale personalized marketing collateral programs using the core FusionPro VDP composition engine. It can be integrated with W2P solutions and high-volume, hands-off internal VDP composition workflows to generate thousands of pages per hour from layouts created with FusionPro Desktop.
XMPie PersonalEffect is an integrated software solution for the creation, production, deployment, tracking, and measurement of creative, one-to-one communications. PersonalEffect solutions leverage Adobe CS4 and span everything from variable data print to comprehensive cross media. PersonalEffect Print is a server-based solution for high volumes of VDP. PersonalEffect Cross-Media is a complete solution for personalized print, email, Web, and mobile marketing. It incorporates XMPie’s uProduce Marketing Console for campaign tracking and analysis and the RURL Wizard and Templates for easy creation of personalized cross-media campaigns.
Taking Advantage VDP
The true value of VDP is on the frontier. "From the feedback I get daily, it seems as though much of this marketplace is still in the infancy stages of really exploring the true potential of variable data marketing," explains Greg Bane, channel manager, Design Merge, Meadows Publishing Solutions.
Tools used to create, deploy, manage, and measure a campaign are advancing. "Better enterprise systems mean improved data mining; this leads to a higher quality business intelligence and finer targeting of recipient’s interests," says Genevieve Paquette, corporate marketing and communications manager, Objectif Lune.
Although electronic communications are an important component in VDP applications today, print is still essential. "Print is one of the primary and preferred means of communication and more graphic solutions provide integration to variable data publishing software allowing designers and campaign managers to work together to create a high-impact campaign that ties the printed piece to other vehicles, optimizing its ROI," states Paquette.
With a new batch of trends emerging as VDP software advances, consumers can expect a more personal experience in terms of customer communications. As mobile phones, social networking sites, and email continue to play an important role in everyday tasks, marketers must capitalize on the opportunity, but not forget their roots.
For more on VDP software tools, including a discussion on hot trends, visit www.dpsmagazine.com and search key phrase "VDP." dps
