A New Brand of Copywriting?
There is no doubt that, as technology has evolved, the way we approach direct marketing has also seen significant changes – especially in the area of variable print. We’ve touched on this topic before and discussed the possibility of being creative with variable print. Today, however, I want to touch on the three ways that copywriting can actually be impacted by variable print.
1. Varying Lengths
One of the great strengths of variable printing is the ability to actually address the recipient by name. We’ve been doing the most basic version of this for years, creating personalized letters by inserting names (and other data) into the salutation line and even the body of the letter itself.
With the emergence of variable print as an increasingly affordable option, we are seeing more and more people using this same concept in other types of direct marketing, such as postcards. The cards can be personalized right on the press, with varying degrees of graphical richness, depending on the technologies that are used.
For many, it can seem like a marketer’s dream, but this kind of varying copy can present some unique challenges for copywriters.
The names Ed and Christopher have considerably different lengths. These varying lengths can, in turn, have a dramatic effect on the length of a line or paragraph of text in a direct marketing piece. This becomes even more relevant if personalizing with company names. For instance, IBM is much shorter than something like The Canadian Agricultural Marketing Association.
As such, when creating copy for a highly personalized direct mail piece, the copywriter should take these variations into account and consider the impact that they might have on the flow of the text. If you already have a data set, you might consider determining the longest and shortest values for a given field, and using these to do some mockups.
2. Varying Information
Variable print can potentially be the salvation of writers who struggle with crafting copy for a mixed market. Often, you might want to tweak a phrase here, a word there, or even a statistic, based on the profile of the recipient. With traditional offset printing, the only way to do this has been to run multiple versions of the card, address them separately and then merge them all back together into a single mailing.
Variable print changes all of that. It allows us to actually vary certain portions of our copy based on some predetermined condition. For example, in one of our recent mailings to some of our own prospects, we varied a bit of information based on whether the prospect would be marketing to businesses or to consumers. In so doing, we were actively tailoring our copy to the known interests of the recipient.
Marketing this way allows for more flexibility and freedom for the copy writer. It also requires greater responsibility. You need to document all of your variations and test them all to make sure that they flow properly. This is especially true if you plan to be using multiple substitutions, based on different criteria. Make sure that you do a detailed review of every possible combination, and that they all flow properly.
The last thing you want is for two of the substitutions to not work together (thematically, contextually or grammatically), or to simply render the copy unreadable.
For example, suppose that we are a catering company that specializes in gourmet pizzas, and want to target our list of previous clients, personalizing the piece by addressing what the recipient last ordered and the type of event it was. However, in addition to pizzas, the company also prepares other types of foods, such as incredible platters of sandwiches. With all this in mind, the following “variable” paragraph demonstrates some of the issues that can arise:
We hope you enjoyed our gourmet sandwiches! We just wanted to let you know that we’ve tweaked it’s recipe. Now, it’s better than ever – so we hope you’ll try it again at your next company event! We’re sure it will be a slice!
The “substitutions” are highlighted in bold, and the problems are in red. First, you’ll notice that the variable product is “gourmet sandwiches”. However, the generic parts of the paragraph were written primarily under the assumption that the product would be a single type of pizza. Thus, there is a grammatical disconnect between the plural sandwiches and the singular “it” that is used through the reset of the paragraph. Also, the closing sentence uses the term “slice” as playful pun, again based on the assumption of pizza. Because we’re talking about sandwiches here, the pun loses its context and falls flat.
3. Varying Headlines
Variable print can also change the way copywriters approach headlines. Rather than trying to develop the one headline that will have the most appeal across the entire group of recipients, you can actually develop a series of headlines, each targeted towards a different segment of your list.
This is also something that we did on our recent mailing. We started by analyzing the database to determine the key market sectors on the list. With this information in hand, we then turned to the task of crafting a unique headline for each target group. The writing process was extensive to say the least, and involved much experimenting and re-writing.
We also knew that we had to keep the headline to a single line of text on the postcard, so a good part of the writing process actually involved checking line lengths against each other to make sure that everything fit within the same basic range.
Altogether, it was a lot of work, but in the end it was worth it. We had an entire mailing of highly targeted postcards, all run on a single print job and prepared from a single mailing stream.
Conclusion
These are only three examples, but I think that they clearly demonstrate how the role of the copy writer is likely to change right along with the evolving variable print technologies.
Of course, this does not effect or change the basic concepts of writing copy for direct mail. It still needs to be able to maintain attention, to engage the reader, and ultimately motivate them toward some desired action. What variable print does do, however, is provide the copywriter (and the rest of the marketing team) with the tools to compose highly targeted copy to help build more leads and ultimately drive sales.
