Kodak's German Sacristan

Cross Channel Marketing: Four Rules For Printers That Want To Be MSPs

Cross Channel Marketing: Four Rules For Printers That Want To Be MSPs

By German Sacristan, Eastman Kodak, Business Development Manager EAMER

Over the past year or two, I have been based in Belgium. My job has been to buzz from country to country, mainly within Europe, spreading the word and promoting digital marketing. One day, that will mean running a seminar for 200 very enthusiastic marketing specialists in Bulgaria. A few days later, it will mean talking to printers in the UK about their ambitions to move from being print service providers to becoming digital marketing service providers or DMSPs.

But wherever I go, and whoever I am talking to, I find some things never change. People are excited but nervous about the potential impact of multi-channel marketing on their businesses. Many underestimate  the rate at which change will occur and most certainly underestimate how far-reaching the eventual changes will be. So, to help them get these things in perspective, I have come up with a set of four practical ground rules for cross channel marketing.

The four rules could not be simpler:

1. Start selling what your customers are selling.
2. Build the strategy with them first, before you choose what channels to use.
3. Always think “How would we present this if we were selling face to face?”
4. Then just do it. In this area, it’s 10 percent to do with the idea and 90 percent about execution.

The beauty of this kind of oversimplification is that it takes you right back to first principles. And that is where I like to start. Phrases like multi-channel multi-touch marketing can sometimes confuse the issue. As far as I can see, the important thing about all this is the flexibility, the ability to change and customize messages for different circumstances and customers. So I prefer to call it just “digital marketing”, or even just “marketing”, period.  All the old, time-honored rules apply today, just as much as they ever did.

You need to think before you act. You need to know what you need to say, to whom, how many times, when and how. (If you don’t know, it’ll be because you do not have enough information or sensitivity.  Put an ongoing plan together to gather relevant information, or get the right partner in to help if you lack sensitivity.) The answers to those questions will lead you to a strategy, and will make you think harder about your product, market, and history. The how of what to say relates to creativity, sensitivity, and channel. Before you choose the channel, you need to know what you are going to say, when, and to whom. 

I meet a lot of worried printers who are concerned about whether there is still going to be a role for print in a few years’ time, in an aggressively multi-channel world. The answer is yes. Absolutely. There is no doubt whatsoever. Because the combination of digital print and online channels is unbeatable. I am already seeing brilliant examples all the time, and we have hardly scratched the surface yet.

If printers want to sell more printing, they need to stop obsessing about printing. Even though we saw a 10% fall in direct mail volumes in 2009, marketing budgets will keep growing unless there is a crisis.  Someone told me that car sales in the US from 2003 to 2008 grew by 17%, but marketing expenditure grew by close to 1400%. The focus is on marketing and not on printing. If we’d realized that and got it right, print volumes in 2009 would not have dropped at all. The lesson’s simple -- put your focus where the money is.

It is just fantastic how the internet and printing work together. They go together really well. In my view, far from threatening the print industry, the internet is just making print stronger. You can collect so much information on your website – from forms, from comments and from tracking where people go on the site and what they spend time looking at. But how can you follow that up and make the relationship solid and tangible using only email and online tools? The fact is, you can’t. For every reason you give me that email is better than printing, I will give you another reason why printing is better than email. All these channels are here for a reason. Even the TV and radio are still here for a reason. You just need to use them properly.

Print has an irreplaceable role here, giving you the ability to send a precisely targeted, customized printed piece as a follow-up. Instead of just pictures and words and video, your customer now has something real in his or her hands. You can enclose physical objects – catalogs, gifts, vouchers, DVDs, samples. And, at the same time, by printing a 2D barcode or a QR code on the mail piece, you can provide a quick, easy mechanism to take the customer back online again, to your website, the customer’s personalized landing page or, say, a product demonstration video. Print can also help you open a brand new door to someone who does not know who you are. So once you know what you want to say, when, and to whom, your channel choices should be straightforward.

When I say “Start selling what your customers are selling,” that is the fundamental shift of viewpoint that is needed to become an MSP. You are not a printer any more, taking the order, quoting the price per thousand, doing the job by Tuesday, and waiting for the next run. If your customer is selling autos, you now have to be thinking about the best ways to reach car buyers and make the sale easy. If your customer sells vacations, you need to be thinking about how you can help make Florida or Hawaii or Paris irresistible. You need to be learning how to help this customer sustain longer-term relationships, collect more relevant and refined data about the end-users’ preferences, tweak the campaign ideas or develop new ones, re-establish contact in the right ways at the right times, and keep those people coming back for more, year after year.

What that does not mean is bombarding your customer’s customer with too many irrelevant messages, from too many directions, without any sense or consistency. That would be like a sales person visiting a customer over a period of six months and saying random things every time that did not link up to each other. That would be counterproductive, as well as expensive. And it does not mean thinking you have done the job of personalizing a contact just by changing the name. I hate that, the old idea of “personalization” that just means I get a completely standard letter, with “Dear German” (or, at least half the time, “Dear Sacristan”) across the top. I am proud to use the word personalization in a very different way that goes far beyond changing a name or even slotting in a different message. For me, it is about making someone’s experience and relationship personal and therefore trustworthy. It is about helping the person you are communicating with. How can you help me by being vague, generic, and irrelevant?     

But this is where “How would we present this if we were selling face to face?” comes into it. Would you call your face-to-face customer by his first or last name? If someone I don’t know addresses me by name in real life, out of the blue, I don’t find that charming. I find it momentarily disturbing. Who is this? What do they want? How do they know my name? And if that is my reaction in a face-to-face situation, why should I react any differently online or in response to a mailer? It will take a friendly face with a respectful tone that makes me think this could be something valuable and relevant for me to make me keep on listening. The challenge here is discovering how to replicate that with the other channels that are not face to face. But the good news is that just by being aware and thinking about it you will have more and better ideas and the sensitivity to get it right. And don’t forget that every rule has a few exceptions. Use your common sense.

The fourth of German’s Homilies above is about the importance of execution. It is just something I have observed. It applies everywhere, but in our industry, particularly, it seems the pressure and urgency of the day-to-day can mean that important things do not get done. Printers that plan to transform their businesses and become marketing services providers need to have a plan. But having a plan in your office drawer is not enough. You need to execute that plan, or nothing will happen. And even that is not enough. You need to execute it better than your competitors do. Ten percent idea, ninety percent execution. It is the only way to be one hundred percent successful. 

The new tools for cross channel marketing that have been built into Kodak’s InSite Campaign Manager platform are great – powerful, practical, and easy to learn and use. They help you follow a methodology, and that is critical for success. The ability to call on help from the backroom team of data scientists and marketing specialists is another major bonus. And the business model that enables these things to be introduced without upfront costs, as a monthly subscription service, is a very sensible way to let printing companies test the water without risking everything.

But all these innovations are just enablers, and it is important to remember that. Enablers don’t guarantee success by themselves. Success comes from applying the most fundamental, timeless marketing principles – and using the relevant technologies and tools of our age to put them into action in a very different and competitive market place. 

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business

Cross Channel Marketing: The Channel Cart And The Strategy Horse

I’ve been running digital marketing seminars recently, for some interesting audience groups. I come from Spain and I’ve been based in Belgium, but multi-channel marketing knows no boundaries. So I’ve been laying down some principles and helping people work out their ideas in countries like Bulgaria, as well as the powerhouse economies of Western Europe.

Most of what I’m seeing in these different markets is good. But I am also seeing people so excited about the new channels that are available to them that they lose their sense of direction.

For example, you need to start your marketing with a strategy, not a channel. Otherwise, it’s like putting the cart before the horse. Or rather, deciding on the channel to use before you have a strategy in place is like choosing the cart before you have any idea what load you need to carry.

You need to start with the basics – your product’s value, complexity, and unique selling proposition, the customer investment required, market awareness of the product, perceptions of your company, and, above all, the different characteristics and profiles of your target groups. Never forget that people today buy products for many different reasons. So why send everybody the same reason why they should buy from you? It doesn’t make sense.

Once you know the profile of those you need to talk to, it is easier to say the right thing the right way. It is easier to sell them something. The biggest challenge is finding out which profile group people belong to. You can only find out two ways. One is by buying the information from someone who already has it, or from the people themselves. The second way is by engaging the market. Now we are dealing with two key questions. How can you capture the market’s attention? And how many times will you need to contact people to find out what you need to know?

This is where the multi-channel approach comes into its own. You can choose which is the right channel to say what you need to say, when you need to say it and who you need to say it to. You can also, to a large extent, choose how many contacts you will have with them and what the structure of your dialogue will be.

You can make it easy for the person who receives a direct mail piece to use a QR code or a 2D barcode or a PURL to access an online video or an interactive applications guide. You can make it easy for the recipient of an email to click through and have a customized catalog sent through the mail. You can close the loop, so that online supports offline and the physical supports and enhances the virtual.

This is the ultimate power of cross channel marketing. You can give information and collect more instantly. You can put samples of your materials in your customers’ hands and give them access to online databases or video case studies. They can get instant online answers to their queries, download special interest podcasts, and enjoy fast physical delivery when they place their orders. You can make it easier for customers to buy from you, and that is critical. In the past, if I liked the look of a special offer, I often had to hop in my car and drive a few miles to get it. Sometimes I’d have to wait a couple of days because I couldn’t spare the time straight away, with the risk for the seller that I might lose my excitement about the product or that someone might make me change my mind. Today I see something I like, online or off, and I can buy it in a matter of seconds.

Everything works together, and everything works better because of that.

As long as the strategy comes first, this should make life better all round. But whether you’re in Boston, Britain or Bulgaria, you’ve just got to make sure the horse comes before the cart.

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business

Cross Channel Marketing: With A Starring Role For Direct Mail

I’ve heard a lot of people lately worrying about the internet being bad for print. But the way I see it, the internet is just going to make print stronger. After all, what’s digital printing about? It’s about real, meaningful personalization, about sending the right message to the right person with the right creativity in a permanent, durable, physical form. The internet is a fantastic source of information, and how can you get the best out of digital printing without information? On the other hand, I can’t deliver a photobook down the wire, and most people still don’t want electronic presentment of their utility bills. We have to learn to use today’s range of channels to complement each other.

I’ll give you an example. People worry about what’s going to happen to direct mail now marketers can so easily and cheaply send out email blasts instead. But that’s missing the point. A lower cost initiative can sometimes be more expensive, if doesn’t bring you the desired return. And of course, there are some cases where email is best for the job. It can carry links to a website or a video clip, for example.  In a highly visual world, I can easily measure click rate responses. Things like that are great strengths.

These days I see much less email  from people I don’t know. Because, generally speaking, all my email from unfamiliar sources goes straight to my spam box. Or, if it gets through the filters, I delete it unopened, without reading it.

I don’t have two mailboxes outside my home – one for mail, the other for spam.

My postman doesn’t scan my mail and sort it for me.

And I don’t get 100+ items every day, like I do in my email box. So there’s a lot less competition to fight off.

Sure, I get lots of promotional stuff in the mail. Maybe I do open the mail sitting near the garbage can and throw most of what arrives straight in the bin. But I’m doing it in my time, when I choose, and usually when I’m fairly relaxed. I’m just home from work, or it’s the weekend, and I go through it slowly. If you can catch my eye for a second, you’re in with a chance. If you can use a bit of creativity to surprise or intrigue me  and capture my attention, you’re ahead of the game.

If you’ve enclosed a sample, or a voucher, or a gift, I’ve got something from you right there in my hand. And if your offering is at all relevant to me, you really are off to a very good start. Add a QR code or a 2D barcode and the piece of paper I’m holding becomes interactive, giving me a quick link in to a personalized URL or your company website.     

Why wouldn’t a marketer want those advantages, that cut-through, that physical presence? Why wouldn’t campaigns want to use these strengths, allied to the different, complementary strengths of email, websites, and other electronic channels? Why would anyone doubt print’s place in the multi-channel marketing armory?

Someone once said about aspirin, “If they’d invented it this year, we’d be hailing the new wonder drug.”  It’s the same with printed direct mail. If we didn’t already know it so well, we’d be raving about its potential.        

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business

Cross Channel Marketing: Print Makes The Relationship Real

I can hear the grumblings already, after my last blog, about my remark that today’s multi-channel marketing is really just a digitally-enabled version of what we’ve all been doing forever. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not lukewarm about it. You won’t find anyone who’s keener. What I’m worried about is just people mistaking technology for strategy and losing sight of the basics they have always understood. 

If you want to know what really excites me, it’s the way digital print and the internet work together and complement each other. Both have a lot to offer, individually. But put them together properly and the combination is just unstoppable. It’s amazing how well their strengths dovetail with each other.

When I’ve cut through the clutter and gained a prospect’s attention with a relevant and well-judged direct mailer, I can send him or her online via a personalized URL (pURL) or a 2D code printed on the mailer. Once there, my potential buyer can be tracked around the pages of my website, shown case studies or product videos, invited to give more information, or offered the opportunity to subscribe to a blog or to ask technical questions. This is all helping to build information and a more personal and specific relationship, with plenty of opportunity to carry it forward with a follow-up mailing or an email.

In this example, it’s the direct mail that gets the communication process under way, and the channel sequence is personalized printed piece first, then pURL, website, and DM or email follow-up. Printed paper comes into it either once or twice, but is clearly integral to the whole operation.

Turn the situation around and you can use a customized printed mailer to firm up the relationship with online prospects who have provided information on your website. Just knowing the postal address can potentially fill in a lot of what you want to know about a prospect’s financial situation and lifestyle. But nothing does more to make the relationship real than putting a physical object – a gift, a catalog, or a sample – into someone’s hands. Items that sit around the home or on the corner of the desk for days, weeks, or months help implant your branding and act as reminders, prompting buying or further enquiries in ways that on-screen images cannot equal.

Every business and almost every consumer operates at least partly online these days. But, despite appearances sometimes, nobody lives entirely in the online world. Offline is still where most things happen. Bringing the two worlds together is central to effective multi-touch, cross channel marketing. And, believe me, from what I’ve seen, digital print’s key role in that is something nothing else can match. 

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business

Cross Channel Marketing: Just As Face To Face As We Can Get

How many times do you have to talk to a customer before you get your sale? I don’t mean “talk”, like sending a personalized email. I mean talk – really talk, face to face. If you’re in business, you know how many times you or your sales people have to get in front of a potential customer and talk to them before the sale happens. And the answer won’t often be once.

People take time to focus on what they need and on what you are selling. They take time to think about your offer. They may take more time, after that, to warm up to the idea of spending money, to discuss it with their colleagues, to rationalize their choice, and to take the final decision.

Real, non-digital, life teaches us that buying is a process, not an action. And all we’re doing, with all our fancy digital channels, is trying to mimic what we would do if we had the time and energy and resources to go round the world and talk to every one of our potential customers face to face. How many calls can a person make face to face? That is the problem. It is relevant, but it’s just not productive enough. That is why we use all these channels today.

Digital marketing is just marketing, done digitally. That’s all. We’ve been doing this kind of marketing for the last 300 years or so, visiting our customers, doing it face to face.

So that’s a good starting point. I always ask marketers to ask themselves three questions. What do you need to know to sell your product? How many calls would you have to make to sell it face to face?  What would be the objectives of each of your calls? Because why should we assume that an approach that would not work face to face will work in a digital context? If it does, it will be the exception. You need to start with the basics..

If people I don’t know come up to me and start off “Hi German…”, my immediate reaction isn’t “Oh, how nice. This guy is addressing me personally.” It’s more along the lines of wondering why this person thinks he can buttonhole me so directly. And if he gets the name the wrong way round, as we have all managed to do so often in the past, my reaction to “Hi Sacristan…” is going to be even more negative.  And if you get my name right and capture my attention, but then fail to be relevant with your messaging and creativity, the negative impact will be much greater than if you did not call me by my name in the first place. If you don’t call me by my name and you say something irrelevant to me, I will think “Well, he wasn’t talking to me anyway.”  But if you call me by my name you are talking to me, so make sure what you’re saying is correct. No mistakes!

In the same way, if the sales pitch I use in a digital context is not one that would work face to face, it’s really not likely to work like this either.

I know we’re all supposed to be talking about cross channel, multi-media, multi-touch marketing at the moment. But I prefer to just call it digital marketing, or even just marketing. Because all the new tools and channels are only enablers. The new InSite Campaign Manager gives people the most fantastic toolkit. The data specialists Kodak has on call to advise about data enrichment and predictive modeling are incredibly knowledgeable. But it’s all there for just one thing – to help us get as close as we can to the reality and impact of a face-to-face call. And if we can keep that in mind at every stage, that’s how we’ll get the most out of cross channel communication.        

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business

Cross Channel Marketing: Start Selling What Your Customers Are Selling

An OutputLinks Conversation With German Sacristan, Business Development Manager EAMER, Eastman Kodak Company

Ian Shircore: Greetings German. In January you relocated to the United States and before that you worked across many different European countries, helping print services providers that want to develop into multi-channel marketing services suppliers. So thank you for sharing time from your busy schedule with us.

I understand that in your work with print service providers you are focusing more on marketing principles and practice rather than on specific technologies. Is that correct? 

German Sacristan: Yes, absolutely.

There are other people within Kodak who can tell you a lot more about Kodak’s new InSite Campaign Manager and the related consultancy and advice services.

What I’m doing is a different role. I’m promoting digital marketing and talking to printers about marketing in general. I’m reminding them of the basics, because all these new channels and tools are only marketing enablers. At the end of the day, the new channels don’t guarantee success.

People get so excited about the potential of cross-media campaigns and all the new channels, and they think if you use them, you’re going to be successful. I am seeing that emerging as a definite problem in the marketplace, because these enablers can’t do it all. If you don’t have a strategy behind these enablers, you will fail.

So I’m reminding people of what they already know and trying to show them how they can use these new enablers to execute the basic fundamentals of marketing in a very different marketplace.

For me, 10 percent of marketing is the idea and 90 percent is the execution.

Ian Shircore: Who are the people you’re taking this message to?

German Sacristan: Some are the printers that are feeling the pressures of commoditization and looking to become marketing services providers or MSPs. Others are end customers, the people who buy from the printers.

I’m doing these marketing seminars in many different markets – Bulgaria one week, the UK next Monday. There’s a lot of travelling.

Ian Shircore: So when you are reminding these people of the basics and giving them a perspective on the potential of multi-channel campaigns, what are the main channels you talk to them about?

German Sacristan: Well, there’s the physical printed piece, direct mail. There are websites and landing pages and personalized URLs, email and SMS text messaging. And you can add in QR codes that effectively make the printed piece interactive and drive customers to the internet. That’s pretty much everything. And they all have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Ian Shircore: But is print is always part of the mix?

German Sacristan: From a marketing perspective, printing still can do things that other channels can’t.  After all, where will brands face more competitors – on the internet, in your email or in your regular mailbox? When are consumers more relaxed and likely to listen – when they come home and sit down in front a cup of coffee or while they’re working in front of their emails? Does the postman filter the mail for you like your spam filter does? What gives you more information about a person – the email address or the home address? I could go on and on. Digital printing has the flexibility of personalization and individualized customer communication. That’s very powerful. But you need information to make that work. And the internet is the most wonderful source of information. So one feeds the other.

It’s just fantastic how the internet and printing work together. It’s absolutely amazing how they work really well together.

You can collect so much information on your website and use that to send a precisely targeted, personalized printed piece as a follow-up. It is a shame to think how many visitors some brands have on their websites every day and how little they know about them. Knowing who are they and what they want will help these brands to follow up with them, increasing the chance of selling them something.

Ian Shircore: “Personalized?” That’s the second time you’ve used that word, but somebody told me you don’t like “personalization”.

German Sacristan: Ha, yes. That’s right. Just the word, though, not the idea.

Today’s marketing is all about interactivity – and we all call it personalization or customization. It’s hard not to use the word, because it’s become a standard industry term, but I usually try to avoid it if I can.

I don’t like to use the word “personalization”, because it has the perception and history of just changing the name – and doing a bad job. So frankly, I try to avoid “personalization” unless I make a sentence out of it.

Marketing is all about telling people what they want to hear and not what we want to tell them, People want to hear different things because they all buy a product for different reasons. So why are we saying the same thing to everybody? That doesn’t make sense. I like to explain the power of personalization that way, versus just saying “personalization”, because it has a bad perception and a bad history.

Ian Shircore: But the ability to customize to the individual – whatever we’re going to call it – is a key factor in the power of multi-channel marketing, isn’t it? 

German Sacristan: Of course. But customization is about saying the right thing to the right person at the right time, in the right way. Just because you are using channels that allow you to change the messaging does not mean you are customizing. Some brands and print providers fail right there. They think that just because they are using data and changing the messages they will be successful. But they aren’t – because it takes more than that. What many of them have done well, though, is identify good applications like direct mail, transpromo, even books as relevant products to try to implement the values and opportunities of customization.  

Ian Shircore: Am I right in saying that it’s still a big step to make, from print services provider to MSP?

German Sacristan: It is a big challenge for these people. But it’s not as if they’re coming from another planet. They just need to change their mindset. I tell them “You have to stop selling what you’re selling and start selling what your customers are selling.” Once they start thinking that way, they quickly learn to do it well.

If they have customers who are selling automobiles, or vacations, they’re starting to creatively think, “How can I help these customers sell more cars? How can I help these people sell more holidays?” They start asking different questions and collecting more information. They start talking and thinking more about marketing, and for some of them, it’s working well.

But a print services provider’s biggest challenge is still customer perception. That attitude that says: “You are a printer and you don’t know anything about marketing.” Some printers know more about marketing than many marketers. But the assumption is often: “You don’t know anything about marketing, so I’m not going to give you the information for you to help me and contribute to my marketing campaign.”

Ian Shircore:  Are there any practical changes they can make to get over that? 

German Sacristan: Well, perception is one of the biggest hurdles and I work with them to change that perception – sometimes starting by creating a new business name that represents better what they sell, or by finding the right people to help them create the right impression when they contact their customers. Most importantly, if they want to sell marketing services they need to do that themselves for their own businesses. They need to show the potential customers that they are good at it by doing it themselves. This is critical. You have to stand back and think about these things, and maybe that’s something busy printers do find hard to do. I think the urgency of the day-to-day can sometimes stop them from doing important things.

Ian Shircore: I suppose there’s also a confidence issue that must arise. How does a fairly inexperienced marketing services provider know that the campaign approach he or she comes up with is valid? 

German Sacristan:  The good news is that no one knows! No one knows what response they are going to get before they launch a campaign. There are no guarantees, but we need to make sure we have the right methodology, sensitivity, imagination, and channels to increase the chances of success. The InSite Campaign Manager package can help with the methodology, including data analysis and segmentation, which are critical. But I always bring it back to some very basic concepts.

For example, when we’re promoting our products, using all the sophisticated tools and channels that are available to us now, what are we really trying to do? Actually, the way I see it, we are copying the sales person. We did marketing 300 years ago, before all these channels, and we did it face to face. We were visiting customers and promoting our products or our services. And this is what people forget. The basic fundamentals of marketing.

I always tell marketers, “When you’re planning a campaign, think: ‘How would we sell it face to face?’” Because the customer’s needs are going to be much the same in this context as they would be face to face. Forget multi-channel technologies for a minute. Think one to one, face to face.

What do you need to say? To whom? How many times? When? How? When you know the answers to those questions, you can begin piecing it together. You need information to be able to answer these questions, and to get that information you must either buy it or build it. You build it by engaging the market. You can start working out how a direct mail piece here and an email follow-up there could be combined with a pURL and a personalized landing page to cover the same ground that a sales person’s visit would cover. That is often to do with knowing what the sales person does not know but needs to know in order to sell the product. When the combined effect of the multi-media activities adds up to something like a visit from an experienced, old-fashioned sales representative, that’s when you know multi-channel marketing is doing a good job.

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business