Marketing With Personalization & Variable Print

One common but effective direct marketing technique is to make use of ever-evolving variable print technologies in order to add a personal touch to your mailing piece. At Highland Marketing, we are seasoned experts in this area.

The most common form of personalization is the "dear" line that is used to open letters (and some other mailers). Rather than using generic greetings such as "Dear Friend" or "Dear Colleague", you can open your letter with a much more personal opening such as "Dear Bill:" or "Hello Jean." Additionally, your letters would usually include the contact’s name and address in the opening, just as you would do if you were writing to a personal acquaintance. 

But it doesn’t have to stop there! 

With a little bit of creativity and front-end planning, you can also drop personal names, company names, images and even demographically unique sentences right into the body of the letter!

This level of flexibility allows for a great deal of creativity, but caution must be taken. Because variable print relies on a data source in order to produce highly personalized content, you need to have a well-maintained database. Poorly formatted and poorly maintained data can dramatically compromise your marketing efforts, with improper substitutions that impede your ability to use personalization effectively and enjoy the many benefits that it offers.

Highland Marketing also specializes in data restructuring. With a little extra work, we can clean up your database, optimizing it for the generation of highly personalized letters or other types of personalization.

Of course, mailings do not require personalization or variable print to be effective. It is simply one technique that can allow you to "connect with insight", getting closer to your customers and prospects and improving your marketing results.

For more information about maintaining your database for personalized letters, please see the document "We want to make your data 'letter' perfect" and chapter 5 of our Database and Address Accuracy Primer.

Online Demonstrations

Want to see a bit of personalizatio and variable "print" in action? Try our demos. These simple little apps accept basic data from you and emulate certain variable print techniques, to give you a strong visual example of how they really work.

Variable Copy Demo

The Variable Copy Demo accepts a name and some brief survey information, then returns a series of uniquely personalized fragments of copy. Additionally, we will also discuss how to make proper use of your customer data, and avoid making a few common mistakes.

Variable Imaging Demo

The Variable Imaging Demo accepts a name and a birth date from, then returns uniquely personalized postcard. Not only do we vary the recipients name and some of the copy, we actually vary the graphics as well. Give it a try, and experience the impact of variable print for yourself.