Several of our customers have adopted a Lean approach to advertising mail production. For example, world class print and marketing services business, Pureprint, who have embedded our Lean methodology into the heart of their approach to mail.
In simple terms, Lean DM is about eradicating waste from a mail marketing campaign. Not just the physical materials involved in mail production, but the entire process of creating advertising mail.
Too many businesses are blissfully throwing money away by producing items of mail, which will never result in a desired outcome. Why would you produce and mail an item which had zero chance of success? Possibly worse than this, the item itself could deliver a negative outcome, which could damage a brand’s reputation or upset the person to whom it was delivered.
Pureprint has achieved a global reputation for high quality print – something of a unique proposition in this day. As Matt Rees, Sales Director at Pureprint recently said “we refuse to waste clients’ budgets on ineffective direct mail. We ensure clients spend their budget on mail that achieves positive results or desired targets”.
The Lean methodology is driven by technology and a degree of ‘common sense’. Pureprint’s Lean approach starts at the outset of a campaign’s planning stage. Rees explains “we work in partnership with our clients and their agencies to ensure their campaign objectives are met. We work with them from the design stage right through to the campaign execution and evaluation. Our teams focus on the simple things, which are often overlooked. For instance ensuring creative formats are designed to maximise production budgets, selecting the most appropriate postage tariff solution and land date, as well as advising on environmental considerations.” It doesn’t stop here either, data is at the heart of any successful marketing campaign and Pureprint has adopted every aspect of data quality into their workflows – many of which are automated..
Levi Fox, an expert in data management at Pureprint, conducts a data quality exercise on all data coming through his department to identify data that doesn’t meet Lean standards. Fox says “at every opportunity, we are looking for rogue pieces of data, which will negatively impact a mail campaign and waste clients’ budget. Using The Software Bureau solutions, we screen all data through a series of automated quality routines. These find poor quality data, such as incomplete addresses, duplicates, goneaway & deceased data, as well as those records unlikely to attain maximum postage discounts”. Pureprint’s data workflows are also designed to feedback any data quality concerns to their clients directly, as well as ensuring the source databases are updated too.
Lean DM is a common-sense methodology and one that not only benefits the end client, but also benefits the mail producer’s business. In some organisations, the adoption of Lean DM will involve a change in mindset, but those that do pioneer it, will never look back. Direct Mail campaigns need to achieve specific targets – clean data is a critical aspect of achieving this.
