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www.MyPRINTResource.com JUNE 2014 • INKJET'S AGE 15 are using e-mail, social media, banner ads, SMS texting, and so on instead of print, right? Yes and no. "A DMA [Direct Marketing Association] forecast said that digital or electronic—social, banner ads—now surpassed direct mail in terms of volume of purchases," said Paul Foszcz, product marketing manager, J Press Series, Fujifilm. "However, the ben- efit of direct mail is its high response rate." Think about it this way. E-mail has a very high return on investment (ROI), yes, but only because its "production" cost is so much less than print. This is why spam is such a problem. If the response rate for an e-mail blast is, on average, 0.12 percent, that's good, but only if you're mailing to tens of millions of prospects. Although many consumer products companies like Procter & Gamble do, for a smaller business-to-business market- er with only a few tens or hundreds of thousands of prospects, that 0.12 percent isn't a huge help in the ROI department, re- gardless of how free it may be. There is also evidence that suggests that e-mail is becoming less effective—on so many levels—than it used to be. "Surveys have found that 75 percent of consumers say that they get more e-mail than they could possibly read," said Foszcz. "And spam filters have evolved. So we and other companies have ex- perienced that, if you get open rates of 30 percent these days, you're lucky. Fully half of them are not even getting looked at." So direct mail, with a response rate as high as 4.4 percent, at least gets to its destination and is looked at, even if only briefly. So rumors of direct mail's death have been, as the saying goes, greatly exaggerated. Adding Channels Not that new media are going away any time soon, and stud- ies over the years have found that the combination of print and electronic channels is more effective than any one of them in isolation. Hence, a growing emphasis on what some call—not without disparagement—"marketing services." A related, but perhaps more acceptable, term is "campaign management." Precision Dialogue Direct (PDD) (www.precisiondialogue. com) is a direct mail printer based in Chicago. They've been in business for 55 years and do a high volume of offset and digital work for clients in such verticals as finance and banking, tele- communications, and pharmaceuticals. They've grown to 300 employees and, six years ago, acquired a company in Cleveland, "solely for the purpose of developing our interactive capabili- ties," said Phil Manade, director of data services/digital develop- ment for PDD. "It's a phenomenal brain trust of data analytics and web analytics. We knew that was the wave of the future, that big data would control the projects." PDD was an early adopter of production inkjet, largely monochrome, and has always had the technological savvy to customize its own systems rather than necessarily buy "off the rack." They're currently in the process of evaluating color inkjet systems. "We're deep in the middle of that acquisition and re- search right now," said Manade. "Wide-web, four-color inkjet is really coming of age right now. Two years ago, we didn't see the equipment was there yet." Sometimes there are advantages to not being an early adopter. He added, "A lot of our competi- Collins Inkjet ofers superior inkjet solutions for Mailing and Addressing, Package Printing, Coding and Marking, Commercial Print, Graphic Arts Printing, and other In-Plant production printing. 1201 EDISON DRIVE l CINCINNATI l OH l 45216 CALL US TODAY: 513-948-9000 WWW.COLLINSINKJET.COM LEADING & INNOVATING INKJET INKS FOR 24 YEARS For more information, visit MyPRINTResource.com/10004498 QPsupp_13-16_0614 NextGen.indd 15 5/15/14 11:56 AM