Sustainability in Print: Precision Targeting as a Competitive Advantage

How precision targeting cuts waste, improves ROMI and delivers measurable results

Does this feel familiar?

You didn’t join the print industry just to push paper; you did it to make a difference. To help clients hit their goals, stand out from the competition, and see real, measurable results (as I’m sure it says on your LinkedIn profile!). That’s why you shudder at the thought of your clients paying for print which doesn’t deliver measurable action; printing things that nobody wants, reads or needs. What a waste!

You’ve known for a long time that the most significant waste of print spend is print that is dumped, pulped or stuck in a kitchen bin with barely a glance and you’ve been heard at the water cooler muttering about untargeted print, generic campaigns and undifferentiated messages. You’re frustrated when organizations rely on scale to compensate for low engagement. You shudder to think about high discard rates, unnecessary waste and print that ends up in landfill.

We get it. Though you might tell people you’re a print service provider, print isn’t a commodity for you – it’s a means to an end. And that end is to be a problem-solver for your clients and deliver measurable print and omnichannel campaigns that solve their communications needs and boost their return on marketing investment. Print in landfill is the antithesis of your objectives, values and goals.

You want happy clients running successful campaigns.  If it’s sustainable too, that’s the icing on the cake. Now we can help you make that happen.  

Introducing Print XMPie-Style: Happy clients, successful sustainable campaigns

If you’re nodding along, you’re going to love our approach to making your customers happy which runs on the principle that fewer, smarter touches increase the return on marketing investment (ROMI) and reduce total resource use. Waste is cut at every stage:

1. Audience segmentation: Segmentation means you avoid sending print to recipients who aren’t going to engage in your campaign or convert. You start the process with clean audience data, suppression lists and propensity scoring or you design the campaign from scratch with no existing data, using permission-based acquisition strategies to build a compliant, engaged audience from the ground up. This means you’re targeting the people most likely to act, achieving better results and giving your clients an immediate advantage over the competition
2. Customization and personalization with VDP strategies: Personalization targets the individual. Customization targets defined groups or segments. Modular templates enable both, increasing relevance through variable text, imagery and offers. Keypoint Intelligence calculated an average profit margin increase of 10.5% for VDP jobs compared to static print.
3. On-demand production: On-demand production ends storage issues and obsolescence. You can create just-in-time batches and micro-runs by segment, location or lifestyle stage. Localized print hubs can also reduce transport costs, which has a further positive environmental impact
4. Triggered print: Print is triggered based on customer journey milestones and actions, increasing relevance at each touchpoint. Just watch those response numbers going up and up
5. Test and refine: Continuous measurement and learning are key to your clients getting increasingly better returns

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But how do you explain this to clients and stakeholders without risking accusations of greenwashing?

Making it count: KPIs for the win

Use the XMPie platform and you don’t need to worry about greenwashing or misleading results. You’ll support your clients as they achieve their goals, and you’ll be able to measure and quantify the print or campaign’s performance and sustainability impact for their key stakeholders and customers.

Here are five KPIs you can use to this end:

• CO₂ per conversion (not per piece): An untargeted campaign sending 100,000 pieces with a 1% conversion rate delivers 1,000 conversions. A precision-targeted campaign sending 50,000 pieces with a 2% conversion rate delivers the same 1,000 conversions. The per-piece CO₂ remains unchanged, but the CO₂ per conversion is halved.

• Print-to-response ratio: The number of printed pieces required to generate a response, with lower ratios indicating higher relevance and less waste.
• Discard rate: You can measure this via QR/app interaction or return-to-sender.
• Obsolescence rate: The percentage of the stored stock which is pulped.
• Campaign lift vs baseline: How much better the campaign performed compared to what would have happened if you didn’t do the campaign (the baseline). This is usually shown as a percentage increase in metrics like sales or conversions.

Implement these KPIs, and you’ll enable data-driven precision, making print more effective and campaigns more measurable with no greenwashing in sight. Your clients will get better results, and you’ll look good.  What more could you ask for?

But don’t just take our word for it.

Industry Recognition for XMPie in Sustainability

Our approach has been independently recognized with the first Buyers Lab (BLI) Pacesetter Award in Sustainability: Production Workflow. The award was given in recognition of our software’s ability to significantly reduce our customers’ carbon footprints through targeted communications across multiple channels.

Here’s just one example of a client we’ve worked with in this way:

Latcham is a mailing and fulfilment house based in Bristol, UK. Using XMPie, they have driven transformative business change while delivering clear environmental benefits; shifting to personalized, targeted communications, making smarter print-on-paper decisions, implementing print-on-demand workflows and delivering omnichannel campaigns including interactive PDFs.

Working with us, Latcham automated and simplified the production of hyper-personalized content across print and digital using an end-to-end Adobe workflow, enabling unlimited creativity and scalability. This has allowed them to expand into new, high-value services such as data-driven print, VDP, W2P and omnichannel marketing automation, all powered by a single personalisation engine.

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At XMPie, our platform is designed to help customers drive transformational business change. Precision targeting cuts waste and consistently lifts results, giving our clients (and their clients) a significant competitive advantage. Get in touch to find out more about how XMPie will help you turn sustainability into a measurable business advantage.