What Makes a Great Personalization Engine?
Marketers have been experimenting with efficacy of personalized creative in some form or another for decades and the results are in – personalization works. That’s why brands and marketers across many industries have adopted high-volume personalized advertising and communications as a mainline strategy. Variable Date Printing via a personalization engine is the main technology that enables this practice.
Personalization engines enable companies to tailor and deliver marketing communications by applying recipient data to a creative template. Automating the process of versioning unique and personalized pieces of content is the core of what personalization engines do.
Variable data printing (VDP) has opened new channels for multi-media marketing efforts that have become instrumental for the success of many companies in highly competitive markets. More and more, commercial printers are adapting to this demand and offer variable data printing to their customers.
As more printers adopt the technologies that enable variable data printing and marketing personalization, such as web-to-print, the bar will continue to rise. The largest brands and agencies are always looking for ways to improve their marketing, whether that be via new strategies or better workflows.
A good personalization engine let’s marketers customize their collateral and feed a customer list into a template to create versioned pieces. A great personalization engine is one that goes above and beyond these basics of VDP. And that’s the kind of competitive edge that tells a potential customer that they’ve found a print provider worth sticking with.
Personalization Is More Than Direct Mail
It’s worth pointing out that “personalization engine” is a bit of a broad category. These solutions cover more than just direct mail with personalized recipient information. It also includes personalized corporate, promo, and sales collateral such as business cards, flyers, letterheads, stationary, and more.
Many marketers have found that these solutions are great for automating repetitive processes in the workflow of marketing asset distribution. By simplifying the editing, proofing, and approval steps involved in distributing marketing collateral, brands can scale their marketing strategies much faster and reduce touch points, wasted time, and manual mistakes along the way.
Not only are personalization engines great for automating tasks in the marketing asset distribution supply chain, they also follow the modern business trend of that favors self-service. By enabling self-service, users can do content creation work themselves with templates that contain brand rules and guidelines. No more waiting for designers or agencies to create documents, and no more worries about brand consistency.
Now that we’ve established the scope of what modern personalization engines cover, let’s get into the details that separate the best-in-class solutions from the rest of the pack. In the next section we’ll cover some of the value-added features, advanced capabilities, and specialized traits that set apart the best solutions for print marketing personalization.
3 Next-Level Personalization Engine Features
Product Kits and Bundles
Imagine a sales-heavy corporation with locations all over the nation. They might have something like a “new hire” package that is given to each new sales rep brought onboard. It could included branded products such as stationary, name tags, business cards, hats, shirts, and pens. Some of these products will need to be personalized with the new hire’s name and other info, some will not.
Now, imagine a web-to-print personalization engine with a feature that allows that corporation to create a templated “bundle” that includes all these products and all the new employee has to do is login to the portal, find the new hire bundle, click Personalize, and watch the system apply his user info to the right spots on the right products.
This is the kind of automated smart data usage that the most modern personalization engines are capable of to streamline the once tedious tasks of marketing managers and HR people of the world.
Templates with Brains
The bare minimum that a VDP template has to do is make it possible for a user to input their own text and then tell the system where that text should go on the printed product. But the bare minimum just the beginning of what the best templating systems can do.
Personalization engines such as those found within Propago add intelligence into their templates so that the system reacts dynamically to what the user inputs. These templates are given rules such that if the user types a long name, the font will shrink accordingly, and then if the font starts to get too small, the line will break into two lines.
This kind of dynamic and contextual behavior opens up a world of possibilities for ways to make the marketer and end user’s lives easier. At the same time these rules empower tight brand compliance and ensure that self-service doesn’t undercut product quality and consistency.
Digital Asset Banks
Many personalization engines allow users to upload their own images to customize items like flyers. Only some solutions go a step beyond and allow companies to create pre-approved banks of images that end users can quickly choose from without having to have any images on their own machine for the flyer they want to customize.
Going even one step further, solutions such as Propago include a full-fledged Digital Asset Management module within the web-to-print solution. This allows organization members to update the banks of images that can be picked from when end users are customizing print so that logos, locations, or creative can be kept up to date.
Advanced Personalization, Marketing, and What It Means for Printers
The bigger picture of all this is that print providers need to adapt to the growing expectations of convenience, self-service, automation, and efficiency that marketers and brands have for the providers they work with. And in a way these brands are also simply adapting to the growing expectations of their audiences. These audiences are reacting to the power of personalization and marketing experiences tailored to their unique needs. So, brands are doubling down on this technology and print providers must move in step.
The potential return on investment for offering an advanced solution for marketing asset management and personalization is huge. It is part of the seismic shift that many print providers are making away from commodity-based pricing towards account-based, long-term business relationships. This requires both a mindset shift and thinking more like a marketer than a printer and a willingness to adopt cutting-edge technology that in end benefits both you as a print provider and the clients that will come back to you time and time again for their campaigns.
