During a panel discussion at PRINTING United Expo on optimizing direct mail, Nick Benkovich, vice president of portfolio management and strategic partnerships for Print ePS, broke some somber news to the audience:

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve read somewhere that print is dead,” he said.

Considering that the session, moderated by Toni McQuilken, senior editor at PRINTING United Alliance’s NAPCO Media, took place at an enormous trade show about the print industry, it was obvious that Benkovich was joking. The reality of the direct mail situation is that, as the panelists explained, it works best when it serves as a complementary piece.

“It’s interesting. Over the last 10 years, there was this whole ‘print service providers moving into managed print services’ thing, and everything’s going to be email,” he said. “But the reality is, statistics tell us that mail is actually the anchor of any of these great marketing campaigns. People at any age still like that tactile feel.”

Benkovich has noticed that people tend to delete emails without even looking, and then they’re gone forever. Poof.

“When mail arrives in their home, I know from my own experience, I’ll pick it up, my wife will pick it up, my kids will read it. It has a life span,” he said.

Emails have value, but they need to work alongside print pieces. The print piece can go out first, and marketers can use email and data to make sure the pieces arrived, follow up with prospects to see if they’ve responded to the call to action on the print piece and go from there.

Use Your Data

Data is really the most crucial part of the whole process, the panelists said. Well, actually, the most important part is making sure the addresses are correct – otherwise the mail piece is useless.

“Sometimes with all of these different steps, the mailer forgets the single most important thing is the address,” said Leo Raymond, executive director of Mailers Hub. “If you’ve spent 2 cents or $2 on a mail piece and you can’t get it delivered to the mailbox, you’ve wasted your money.”

“There’s the old adage that 50% of marketing dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which one,” Benkovich added. “Let’s start with getting the address right, get the content right.”

Think Dollars and Sense

Cost factors into the direct mail process in a big way, too. And, a lot of distributors might not be aware of this, but tiny design details in the actual art can throw off the cost of your mailing campaign.

Certain shapes might cost more to mail through the USPS, and depending on who your customers are, they might receive certain favorable rates from the USPS. Raymond used the nonprofit world as an example, which gets special pricing from the postal service for its direct mail pieces. But, when you’re working with these customers, he said, any design element that might make it look too commercial could change that.

“If you have something that invokes a commercial partner, the postal service has rules about what you can put in a mail piece at nonprofit rates,” Raymond said. “If you design this piece, bring it to the post office, and they look at it and say, ‘Wait, you’re talking about Mastercard as the co-branded card with your school?’ Then, all of a sudden, you don’t have nonprofit rates.”

Those rates are often more than organizations like schools or other nonprofits are willing to pay.

Leverage Software

Just like print’s untimely death, there have been plenty of reports that the robots are taking everyone’s jobs. While it’s easy to joke about that uprising and AI, the truth of the matter is that, just like email and print can work together, human ability and computerization can share the load of a direct mail campaign. Printers should be using software integration throughout the printing and mailing process that works together and makes the process easier from end to end, Benkovich said. That way, it limits people having to literally carry pieces around the production floor. But that requires being knowledgeable about the process and the software to make sure that your programs all play nicely together and actually streamline the process.

Because the goal of the printer or distributor, ultimately, is still maximizing your ROI – both in terms of money spent and time spent.

Benkovich remembered one customer he worked with whose runs varied from 7 million pieces to just 2,500.

“That’s insane,” he said. “If you have 7 million pieces, and you have humans spending five hours on it, you’re still making a ton of money. Now, get down to 2,500 pieces. If the workflow requires five hours of human interaction, you’ve just given up every penny that you’ve made. The automation and integration are what allow people to scale.”