What’s another name for personalized printing? Relationship marketing! This is an approach that uses personalized printing to focus on nurturing long-term customer relationships rather than pursuing just the short-term sale. How does this work? 

Say you are a family-owned hardware store. Typically, a customer walks in, does his shopping, and you are available to answer questions and recommend products. You hope that your excellent service, quality merchandise, and expertise will maintain the customer’s loyalty. You might have special promotions or discounted merchandise in a bin at the front of the counter, as well. 

What might this look like if you decide to add relationship marketing? 

It looks a little different. Each time a customer walks in, you smile and greet them, but you also ask if they would like to be on the mailing list for your newsletter “Tips for Shop & Home.” If they say yes, you collect their name, address, and additional information, such as whether they rent or own, have children and their ages, and any specific home needs such as a garden, pool, or workshop.

Once a month, you send out a personalized newsletter addressing each customer by name. You customize the content, providing weatherizing tips, suggestions for ongoing home maintenance, and relevant offers based on what you know about their property. If they garden, for example, you might offer planting tips and discounts on seeds, berry bushes, or garden mulch. If they have a pool, you might offer winterizing or seasonal opening tips. 

To deepen the relationship, you find other opportunities to engage your customers, as well. This might include an occasional customer survey, feedback form, or contest (such as best recipe using home-grown vegetables or DIY project). This makes each customer feel valued and more deeply engages them with your store, while at the same time giving you more information to further personalize future mailings. 

That’s relationship marketing—and it’s one of the opportunities that make personalized print so powerful.

There is no getting around the increasing importance of data in marketing. In fact, according to Forbes Insights,^[1] 64% of global marketers “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial to success within a hyper-competitive economy. Similarly, Gartner found that 69% of marketing leaders expect the majority of their decisions to be driven by data.^[2]

Why do data-driven decisions matter so much? Even the best marketers can be misled by going with their guts. Think of some of the famous missteps in branding. Remember the disastrous introduction of “New Coke”? Or GAP’s infamous logo reintroduction that was universally hated by its customers? These were the result of great ideas not sufficiently backed up by data.

The same principle applies in marketing. If you are selling a new beauty product, do you need to create different messaging for women who are Gen Z versus Millennials? Are your customers more likely to respond to a call to action highlighted in yellow or red? Do response rates improve if you swap out images based on gender, age, or geographic location? These are the kinds of decisions that should be made based on data. 

Need to learn more about your customers? Here are three ways to do that: 

Customer surveys: If you want to learn more about what your customers think and what they value, ask them.

Tracking and metrics: Use barcodes, redemption codes, cookies, and other forms of response tracking. Don’t just ask people what they think. Watch what they do. 

Purchase data: You can learn a lot about your customers by purchasing insights such as their interests (based on purchases, magazine subscriptions, etc.), contributions to charities, and other third-party data. 

Your marketing is too important to base it on guesswork. Use data as your “eyes” to make sure you are getting it right. If you need help, just ask!

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^[1] Data is derived from a survey of 162 U.S.-based senior executives conducted by Forbes 

^[2] Gartner Marketing Analytics Survey (2018)