AlphaGraphics Store wins PODi best practice award

Small Company with Big Ideas - AlphaGraphics of Billings, Montana wins a best practice award for its 1-2-1 mailing campaign.

The PODi Best Practices Awards are given out every year to companies that submit the best case studies involving digital printing.

AlphaGraphics, Billings employes 28 people in jobs from sales to mailing services but is the second largest printer in a small city (Billings' population is around 100,000), and so it has to be a generalist out of necessity. It offers whatever printing services the local market needs, including both offset and digital printing.

The company wanted to increase its digital printing volume, and it thought that direct mail with personal URLs (PURLs) might be a good way to do that. There were two problems with that idea: most potential customers in Billings had no idea what PURLs were, and this was the first time the Billings store had used the personalised marketing software.

The store decided to do a self promotional mailing that would educate the market about PURLs and test them in practice using XMPie software to generate the mailing, and MindFire to generate the PURLs and handle the personalized landing pages. The mailing pieces were printed on a Xerox 6060.

Multiple touches

From the beginning, AlphaGraphics realized a single mailing would not be enough to educate their audience to the new service and would require multiple

"touches." The company decided to call its PURL-based service "DirectHit." The campaign for DirectHit was organized around an "entertainment" theme. Customers and potential customers targeted were decision-makers and heads of marketing, rather than print buyers.

The initial postcard mailing briefly described the DirectHit concept, encouraged the recipient to "log on to your personal website today!", and offered a chance to enter a drawing for an iPod as an incentive. It got a 7.5% response rate (measured in terms of actual PURL visits).

This was a strong showing, but (as Tom Webber, AlphaGraphics' Senior Sales Consultant, explained in a presentation at the PODi AppForum) the company learned some valuable lessons including:

• The AlphaGraphics logo needed more prominence. Some recipients didn't realize this was coming from a company they were already familiar with.
• The card needed to be mailed in an envelope, since AlphaGraphics realized that some of their postcards were not making it past the mailroom or the front desk.
• The PURL needed to be more clearly displayed.

A second, improved postcard in an envelope was mailed a few weeks later to the non-responders. With the changes, the response rate increased to 14%.

For more information on AlphaGraphics and the Billings store please visit  AlphaGraphics Billings