How to dramatically cut postage, printing and fulfillment costs while reducing your impact on the environment.

Greg Warner

July 06, 2010

Regularly sending out lots of information to prospects, clients, or customers?

How are you doing that?  Is it time consuming?  Are the packets messy?  Lots of paper?  Lots of postage?  Lots of headaches?

A lot of our clients have tried to eliminate all that by sending automated emails or pdf downloads.  But, unfortunately, they’ve found that almost 50% of their recipients actually want printed documents.  There’s still value there.  People lose emails and pdfs too easily.  The printed item is durable and sometimes more effective.  Bottom line: some people just plain want it in their hands.

So you print lots of stuff, put the items in storage, spend tons of time pulling them as needed and end up with a pile of waste when the items become outdated.  Ugh!

Here’s what we discovered about 4 years ago.  You can take all the information that your constituents might request and deliver just the right message to each person on an “as needed” basis.  We built several systems that do just that.  And we ended up giving the whole thing a nifty name: Flexible Documents®.  You can see one example (for a travel company) here.

A luxury hotel company sends a personalized Keepsake Memento to each traveler upon their return. Each one includes images and text recapping their unique travel experience.

Basically we take all the information your recipient may want (photos, text, graphics) and turn them into “data assets”.  Then when the information is ordered, our technology system pulls only the information that is needed and it’s turned into a neat, concise booklet, brochure or flier.

For instance, a system we built for the American Diabetes Association has 10 different subjects that respondents often request.  Rarely do they want all 8 subjects in their packet.  Some people choose just one, some choose a few and others request all of them.  The system delivers only what they request.  

Here’s a list of all the cost-savings they received:

1. Printing- They no longer print tons of stuff only to have the items sit on shelves
2. Postage- Organizations will often send too much stuff.  And that means the packets get heavy.  Heavy = Expensive Postage $.
3. Environmental costs- About 45% of all informational items get tossed in the trash because they become out-dated.
4. Stewardship of the environment-  If you send too much “stuff”, it looks like your organization doesn’t care about the the environment.  That kind of attitude can drive customers away.
5. Administration- Someone has to physically put packets together.  That costs money.  Even if your receptionist does it.
6. The cost of confusion- Sending too many irrelevant materials confuses people.  Streamlined communications are more powerful.

I know I’m making it sound easy… because it is… for you.  Our system is incredibly powerful and complex.
I hope all of that doesn’t sound too much like a huge sales-pitch.  But we’re excited about what we’ve developed here.  And these unique solutions have helped lots of organizations cut costs while improving the impact and efficiencies of their messages.  And besides… we’re MarketSmart.  So we’re allowed to sell a little here and there right?
Until next time…