Marketing campaigns combine personalized printing with electronic communications.

By Erik Cagle

A School for All Seasons

Marketing Services Provider: D3 Logic, Providence, RI. Client: Small university in the Northeast.

Background: An educational account in the New England area was seeking a creative way to reach out to its prospect list. Previously, the university had only used e-mail blasts to query prospective students.

Campaign Objective: To increase student awareness about the university and request information about attending.

Target Audience: A targeted list of 9,000 prospects.

Structure and Components: A multi-touch, cross-media campaign, it began with an initial e-mail query to the prospect list with a personalized URL embedded in the copy. Click-through participants were led to a four-tiered process featuring a welcoming page, a survey, an update page and a "thank you" page. The survey page culled information, such as the respondent's favorite season (spring, summer, fall, winter) that allowed D3 to incorporate personalized data in future stages of the campaign.

On the second touch point, an e-mail was sent 15 days later to non-responders. The aggregated responders were then sent a postcard through the mail. That postcard contained personalized elements gathered from information provided in the survey. Those recipients who completed the process received a thank you e-mail and the opportunity to opt-in to an SMS (short message service) text messaging campaign.

"We used other interesting data," notes Gregory Dale, vice president of integrated marketing for D3. "For example, based on their location, we were able to calculate how far away they are from the university. So the personalization actually read, 'Gregory, you're only 852 miles away from (the university).' Then we'd swap in their season of choice."

Results: While it is still an ongoing process, the school is thrilled with the response rate thus far. The school felt the campaign represented a creative way to use advanced personalization. D3's ability to integrate the personalization into a digital survey and leverage that information to drive the next step in the process bolstered the early results.

One of the keys to the campaign was using the postcard portion farther downstream, thus saving postage spend for the core group of prospects that followed the campaign, thus demonstrating a higher level of interest in the university.

"With direct mail embedded at the back end of an integrated program, that qualifies using the visual tactics. You're sending out direct mail to a relatively qualified candidate downstream in the program," Dale remarks. "That's how we approach it, advising our clients to allocate where and how to spend or how to design and implement the program using cross-media."

The real beauty of digital enhancements such as QR codes and Augmented Reality is that they catapult the printed piece into another stratosphere, incorporating a dynamic dimension that enhances its value from a cross-channel marketing perspective. It allows marketers to be even more creative and analytical with their campaigns, while making it easier for the end user to interact and experience the full gamut of a product or service.