[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:03] DC: This is the true story of two printers who agreed to podcast with me and have their opinions recorded. Listen to what happens when printers stop being polite and start getting real.
[0:00:13] JM: Hi. This is Jamie McLennan.
[0:00:15] WC: And this is William Crabtree.
[0:00:16] DC: I’m your host, Deborah Corn. Welcome to The PrinterChat Podcast.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:28] DC: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Podcasts from the Printerverse. This is Deborah Corn, your Intergalactic Ambassador, more specifically, we are here with the PrinterChat Podcast, which means my two chatty printer friends are with me. Hello, Will, the printer, hello, Jamie, the printer.
[0:00:44] JM: Hello, Deborah. How you doing tonight? Hello, Will.
[0:00:47] WC: Hello, Jamie. Hello, Deborah.
[0:00:49] DC: That’s my favorite thing. We have a guest waiting in the wings. Let’s do a quick catch-up before we bring on our mystery guest. Jamie, what’s going on in Jamie’s world at Invoke?
[0:01:02] JM: When we caught up last time, we had our intern coming and we had new sales reps hired. It’s been almost two months since they’ve been here, since the beginning of June. Yeah, it’d be two months soon. Our two sales guys just graduated RIT. They’re working as a tandem team. They’re doing pretty well. It’s fun to have them asking a million questions. They’re packaging guys and label guys, so they accepted this job to be our new sales, our young sales team coming in, learning sales from the ground up, since they’ve never sold before. It’s pretty cool. We catch up every Friday to find out how their week’s gone, what they’re planning for next week. That’s cool.
Our new intern is almost done. She’s been here for eight weeks now. She got two more weeks left. We hired our last year’s intern at the same time, and she’s doing pretty well. Quick little recap. Then next podcast, I might be able to share some news about possible acquisitions we’re working on here.
[0:01:55] DC: Uh-oh. There they go again. Will can’t go to a trade show without buying a piece of equipment, and Jamie can’t go two weeks without buying a company, so there you go. William, what’s going on with you at the Tampa media empire?
[0:02:09] WC: Things are chill, for the most part. We’ve sunset 813 shirts, sort of. I mean, we saw for all the services, but the brand has been sunset. We rebranded everything at the building to be Sign Parrot, so that we are co-branded for Tampa Printer and Sign Parrot. Sign Parrot was a much more prominent brand. We are launching stickergorilla.com. I just got that up and built. I’m building and adding more sticker products. We did wind up, you mentioned earlier about can’t go to a show without buying something. I did wind up buying the Roland that we saw at, was that ISA that we saw that at?
[0:02:42] DC: Yes, ISA.
[0:02:43] WC: At ISA, I did buy the Roland.
[0:02:44] DC: I’m going to take credit for that, my friend at Roland.
[0:02:46] WC: It’s been delivered, it’s been installed, and everyone says it’s a joy to operate. All the production guys are happy with it.
[0:02:53] DC: Excellent.
[0:02:54] WC: It’s cut down a lot of our process and workflow that’s associated with stickers. Then putting out a brand and doing AdWords in the Southeast, and I think we’re going to do really well with it. I’m excited for that. Printinginabox.com is up and operational and ready to accept, I don’t want to say applications, because you just sign up and your store front goes live. It’s completely automated. There’s only two license options, basically, an informational website, or the full complete package that does everything. CRM, workflow management, pre -press, online design, corporate portal, e -commerce, invoicing, sales tax, it does everything to run your shop. It’s $199 a month, no contract, no setup fee. You can go to printinginthebox.com, sign up online. Your storefront goes live immediately. Almost immediately. All you have to do is say your name servers. That’s up and running, and those are the big things for me right now.
[0:03:43] DC: Excellent. I mean, if Jamie and I could have a demo, we could look around and then we can have a podcast about it. I’d love to learn more about what’s going on over there.
[0:03:53] WC: I love that. We actually have a demo for every type of our platform and it resets at midnight, so you can literally go in and run amok and you can change things, edit things, add to things, do whatever you want to it, and you’re not going to break anything. Then at midnight, it resets again, so anybody can get in and play around on those playgrounds. I’m happy to give those logins and provide those to you guys, or anyone else that’s listening as well. If you want to check it out, let me know.
[0:04:14] DC: Excellent. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. I have some big news, big giant news. I’m going to Label Expo Barcelona. I’m going to Label Expo Barcelona.
[0:04:25] WC: I want to go to Barcelona.
[0:04:26] DC: Let me tell you, it has been three months of hell trying to figure out how I was going to get there, but luckily, the fine folks at Label Expo have invited me to host their show for theater called The Pulse, which I am honored to do and I am looking forward to going to Barcelona. Olé, everybody.
[0:04:48] WC: Barcelona.
[0:04:49] DC: Barcelona.
[0:04:50] WC: When is that?
[0:04:51] DC: I’m flying on the 14th. I think the show starts on the 16th.
[0:04:55] WC: That’s of this year, September, like in a month and half?
[0:04:57] DC: Of September, yes, of this year. Yes.
[0:04:58] WC: Okay. Got you. Got you.
[0:04:59] DC: Yes. I cannot wait to go to Label Expo Barcelona. Thank you so much to Chelsea and Katie, who I spoke to today, who are making it all happen. I have some other news, but you never know about launches, so I will save it for the next podcast, just in case. I don’t want to tip my hat. We have a guest waiting. Here we go.
Direct mail is a big topic in the printing industry. I mean, I go to plenty of LinkedIn groups, and there is always a conversation about direct mail going on. When there was some craziness going on with the post office earlier this year, before you call them, I guess, the ex-postmaster general left, there was a gentleman online who pretty much the printing industry nominated to be the new Postmaster General, and that is Dave Krawczuk. He is the Vice President of Print and Mail Strategy at Lob, the leading platform for automating and personalizing direct mail at scale. Lob transforms traditional mail into intelligent, connected, and measurable customer touch points, and is used by over 12 ,000 companies that reach half of all US households.
Dave leads a team managing the Lob print delivery network, overseeing production, logistics, and USPS., that’s the United States Post Office, coordination to ensure on-time delivery of millions of mail pieces annually, millions and millions. With deep expertise in print operations and workflow optimization, he helps brands replace manual processes with smarter data-driven solutions that enhance customer engagement and streamline production. On a personal note, Dave was one of the first people I ever met in the printing industry. He was one of the original print chatters. It is an honor to have you here, Dave.
[0:07:01] WC: Hello, Dave.
[0:07:02] JM: Welcome, Dave.
[0:07:03] DK: Honor is all mine. Thank you for that great introduction. You are an icon that I am glad to follow and work with in everything that we do. Thank you so much for that great introduction.
[0:07:16] DC: I mean, you’ve helped me with pre-press issues. In chats, I’ve been like, “Dave, my thing’s not printing.” You actually taught me about the overprint thing on my PDF. I had no idea why I wasn’t – letters were missing. You taught me that. Thank you.
[0:07:29] DK: My background and in history is in a lot of – I started out originally in pre-press and moved my way through page construction, page design. The whole entire desktop publishing revolution is basically, tells my life and my history, my career history. That has just continued to evolve in all of these things that we do with digital print as that came out, how that meshed very well with direct mail, and then data-driven campaigns, which is really where I’ve been just laser-focused in on the last couple of years of taking information from data and customer repositories and background information and turning that into really good and effective marketing materials to drive engagement.
[0:08:13] DC: Speaking about really good and effective marketing materials, I have used data from your Lob direct mail studies. This is the second year I’ve actually used it. Can you tell everybody a little more about those and really, how comprehensive it is?
[0:08:29] DK: Absolutely. Yeah. We publish a document every year, actually two of them, which is called The State of Direct Mail. We have The State of Direct Mail, which is really around who’s doing what, who’s going out where, what are we seeing within the marketplace, what are some of the things. There’s a lot of really good chunk information in there that you can use to really compare to what you’re doing, see what you’re doing, but also what the rest of the industry is looking at and being able to do. We do partner with a couple of different data sources out there, and it’s everything from surveys to interviews to communications, and it really puts together a comprehensive document that we then make available to the public that you can find.
The second one is around what we call The State of Direct Mail Consumer Insights. That was very just recently released. That gets into what customers are looking for, looking to do, what works for them. When you sit down and you talk about, oh, people like to see X, or Y, or Z. Those are the kinds of things that the Consumer Insights document will show off. It’s really a nice one-two punch of understanding what you want to do to make your campaigns that much better and bring that into your portfolio. Then also, making sure that what you’re producing is really effectively working for the customers that they’re seeing, because it’s all about response. With what we’re doing, every single mail piece that goes out, you really want to make sure that you’re encouraging, or engaging the correct response that you want from them, no matter what you’re mailing. You want to make sure that what you’re doing is right. If you can pivot and improve that, you’re going to be that much better.
[0:10:06] DC: You were at a conference just yesterday about direct mail, correct? Can you tell everybody about that? Then we’ll open up to the guys to start asking you questions.
[0:10:15] DK: Yup. Yesterday, I was in Washington, D.C. There is an organization called MTAC, the Mailer’s Technical Advisory Committee. Basically, what this is, is a group of individuals who are in the industry, varying different industries, everybody though that uses the postal service to deliver their product. This is everything from marketers to non-profit mailers to catalog mailers. They all come in and we meet four times a year in Washington, D.C. at the USPS’s headquarters. The idea really is just to have a good conversation and some group think to say, from the USPS’s heads are there, and then the industry heads come there to really say, “Okay. How are we going to make this work? What are we doing?”
As you could imagine, it can be everything from fun to contentious, but it’s really, at the end of the day, I do believe that it’s always for the better, because as long as you’re having conversations and discussions, you’re moving something forward. You’re bringing something to life, that maybe not everybody always had the wherewithal, or the understanding to think about. It’s a good thing, it reports right up to the Postmaster General. It is actually his, if we get into technicalities, it is his advisory group that he receives information from. It’s, like I said, it’s a very good forum for all of the groups to get together and hash out what the Postal Service looks like now and what they’re going to look like going forward.
[0:11:43] DC: I think that’s why we all voted you to be the next Postmaster General, because you weren’t getting emotional. When they said they were going to shut down the post office and put it under the Department of Commerce, you were the only voice of reason during everybody freaking out. By the way, I was one of the people freaking out. Will?
[0:11:59] WC: I have actually two questions, but I’ll start with one. I want to recall back to, my concept of time at this point is so skewed. It could have been a month ago, but I think it was more a year ago. There was a point, Deborah, where you had a sky is falling moment, where the data protection and that you could no longer send people direct mail, marketing pieces, unless you were opted in. There was this whole big thing. I was on the sidelines like, ah, there’s no way that this is ever going to be enforced, because it’s data is data. Data is commodity. You can’t protect yourself in that way, prevent yourself from receiving direct mail, let alone being able to sue someone, because they sent you direct mail. What is the state of that? Or is that something that just like, eh, it was a thing and then it fizzled out, or is it still part of the conversation?
[0:12:48] DK: Data and data handling is always a part of the conversation. Because now, what has happened in marketing, or in corporate culture, even just in general, and not just direct mail, but everything, people obviously have a heightened awareness of what information is out there about them that does go from the non-existent, they don’t really do that, all the way up to the “Holy mackerel, did you know that they do this with your data?” It really becomes a challenging thing to make sure that what you’re doing with data is proper and correct and right. There are limited amounts of laws that actually exist around it, and a lot of times where you’ll find is states are actually a bit more aggressive than federal law. It can get a little disjointed, it can get a little disconnected.
Generally, what I’ll always recommend to people, number one, the sky is falling conversation. While it can feel like that, it’s always better to just sometimes take a breath and say, “Okay. What is the reality here? What’s really going to happen? What’s going to go on?” I always like to say, I got a group of people that I have that are my sniff test, and I always toss it past them and say, “Am I overreacting, or am I not?” It’s good to always have them.
When it comes to this, good common-sense moves are always your best bet. Be respectful of the data and the information that you have. Make sure that you handle it in a responsible and respectful way that you would want your data handled by someone else, and you’ll never go wrong, okay? You’re not going to get in violation, or any problems with anybody else. I think if you do that, that handles the data stuff. Then also, how things change over time. If you look at it through that lens, you’re generally not going to go wrong.
[0:14:40] WC: I like that a lot.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:14:42] DC: Are you looking to elevate your game, take your bottom-line customer relationships, and events to the next level? Then, I want to work with you. I’m Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. I engage with a vast, global audience of print and marketing professionals across all stages of their careers. They are seeking topical information and resources, new ways to serve their customers and connect with them, optimized processes for their communications and operations, and they need the products and services and partnership you offer to get to their next level.
Print Media Centr offers an array of unique opportunities that amplify your message and support your mission across the Printerverse. Let’s work together, bring the right people together, and move the industry forward together. Link in the show notes. Engage long and prosper.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:15:44] DC: Yeah. I do remember that situation. It was along the lines of the fact that people were selling mailing lists from – I would sign it for something and those people would sign the mailing list and then all of a sudden, I would start getting marketing from them. Somebody was trying to stop that from happening. But you’re right. I believe, it was California, of course. Everything starts there with privacy and recycling and all that other stuff. At the time, something was going on about that and it was pretty freaky at the moment.
[0:16:11] WC: No, it was. It was a big thing and there was legislation that was being created around it and it was going to trickle out.
[0:16:15] DC: Yeah. It was an act. Didn’t had a name. Yeah.
[0:16:19] WC: But it just fizzled out, right? From my understanding, it fizzled out.
[0:16:22] DC: I honestly haven’t heard from it since and I had to even think what you were talking about. I’ve freaked out so many times about it.
[0:16:28] JM: I remember, and that was one of my questions. So, yes.
[0:16:30] DC: Oh really?
[0:16:31] WC: My follow-up to this, because I’m a data guy, right? I buy data, I scrape data, I do all kinds of crazy stuff. Now from that standpoint where you talk about how data influences and data drives the direct mail piece, and you having 12,000-plus clients, I’m sure that you are provided lots of data, but do you provide data as well? Where would you, for someone listening to this podcast that owns a printing company, where would you direct them to buy data to either A, use for themselves, or B, resell to a client?
[0:17:05] DK: This gets into a challenging space. The reason why I say that is, I don’t look at data as a commodity, or as a per thousand purchase, or just something that you can go out and get. Generally, those kinds of campaigns, or services, or circumstances do not necessarily yield the best results. It may sound good in theory, but in application, it really doesn’t generally work. There’s a couple of reasons for that. I believe, there are a couple of reasons for that. Data is very personal and very specific, to not only the recipients, but also the companies who are using them, okay?
If you have a CRM database, or you have a customer database and the information that you have in there, as long as you maintain it properly, that’s the goal that exists out in the space. Then augmenting that with some of those other data, you have to make sure that you’re being very careful and back to what I said before, you’re being respectful of the recipient that you’re receiving, you’re making sure that the information that you’re getting is accurate. Okay, you don’t want to find yourself marketing to someone, because nothing makes you more mad as a consumer than when you get something that is absolutely irrelevant to you.
[0:18:18] WC: Or it’s too close to home. Sorry.
[0:18:21] DK: Yeah. Or too close to home. I do a presentation on data and I talk about the cool and creepy line, okay? You want to make sure that you never cross that creepy line. Stay on the cool side. Because if you do the creepy line, all of a sudden, people start sitting there going, “How did you know this? Or, how did you get this?” When you get into that space, it creates. I like to say, in the absence of information, people will supply their own. Before you know it, you didn’t necessarily do something nefarious, but somebody thinks you might have, and that becomes the story. You always have to be very careful of that. We’ve heard about dozens of these data releases, or misidentified things, it’s crazy.
My story I was saying right now, right now I’ll even tell you, I’m in the middle of a situation where two databases got crossed up. There are a ton of people out there that think I run a revenue ops team, okay? Now I do not, okay? I’m an ops guy, I run plants, I run facilities, I run that, but I’m getting so many things about increasing my call rates and all this other stuff. It is absolutely 100% wasted time, effort, and on an audience, me, that is not at all interested in that.
When we start talking about data pens and what we want to do in enhancing data, you really do have to make sure that you start from your audience, okay? Make sure that you have them and you have their information there, and then build off of that. Because going outside, in my opinion, going outside and getting external data lists can be challenging, okay? Not that it’s a bad thing, but you got to make sure that you’re doing it in the right way. And make sure that you have the proper profile that you’re looking at to do. Now, where that profile comes from is your original goldmine that you have in your customer source. Start with that and then the rest of them can come about.
You have to make sure the person, or the organization that’s doing it, okay, who’s buying the list at the end of the day, the mail owner, whose name is on the mail piece, they have to make sure that they are clearly enunciating to the team, what are they looking for? What kind of customer are they looking for? You brought up earlier in the conversation like, do you want to go after fit women, who are married in a certain age group and also financial, however that model came out to be? They need to be sure that they’re going after the right people, because at the end of the day, also, it’s their name on the piece. They’re going to be the one who has a reputation boost or hit.
[0:20:58] JM: Dave, so talking about that, generating the data, whatever, say you have your CRM, you know an audience that you want to go after. You have companies that are, just say, maybe small franchises that have less than 20 sites. Something like that, we should be able to go look and tap into that, because we work with companies like that and we can help them grow. Something like that should be, it sounds generally easily to get. What kind of pitfalls do we have to look out for that that were not – hopefully, we have the CEO’s name, or somebody’s good name, but I could just imagine getting a list and you got the guy who that runs the cashier for some reason. Something like that. What should a company look for if they’re looking to buy a list, something like that?
[0:21:44] DK: A few best practices that I like to say is, number one, you always want to make sure that if you can have multiple sources of that data, that is a huge thing. Data in some of these areas is not a huge financial purchase price. They’re pretty aggressive in pricing in the in the space. One of the things I always like to say is cast the net wide, look for multiple sources. You maybe talk to two data providers and get results from the two of them, combine them together and see what are the similarities, but also, see what are the significant differences.
I’m not going to say, exclude anything, but I’m going to say, you want to start looking at, when you start seeing deltas of crazy movement away, when you have commonality, then you know you’re onto something, okay? When you start having these deltas and movements away from things, that’s where you want to start to pay attention and be like, “Okay, which one is this? Why am I seeing this shift? Why am I seeing this difference?” That is really helpful to make sure that your data starts to get clean. That’s number one.
Number two, get into the campaigns. At the end of the day, you have to mail a campaign, okay? What unfortunately a lot of people start to get to is they don’t realize that that campaign is also a data source for them and for what they’re doing and how they’re going about it. It is not a one and done thing. It needs to be cyclical and it needs to be repetitive, redundant. You want to go in and say, what was the result of this? Because everything produces a result. Whether it was good or bad, is to be determined. But if you realize that I just mailed this thing out and I got a 0.5% response rate, okay, you didn’t win, so you learned something.
Now you want to look at that and say, okay, how can I improve this? How can I change this? Those iterative changes are what really start to bring the cream to the top and say, “Okay, you know what? I’ve hit this person this time and this time and this time, they responded to this, they didn’t react to that.” You start to be able to pull those profiles together. This is where, again, multiple data points resources that you can pull together make your list and your campaigns always, continues to improve it. Don’t look for just a one and done hit. Look for something that you are constantly cycling through.
[0:24:13] JM: I love that, because that’s what I talk to small businesses about. They want to do one mailing and think they’re going to get 30, 50 customers. I’m like “No. You have to hit them multiple times and bury that message.” That’s the hardest part to try and sell to people. They just think, “I can just do one mailing and I have 2 500 pieces and I’ll be gold for the next couple of months.” Yeah, it’s the hardest part to sell, okay.
[0:24:33] WC: In historic and classic marketing, you’ve always had the power of three, right? Someone has to see your brand at least three times before it resonates, whether that’s a direct mail piece, a billboard, and a bandit sign, right? Now, it’s the power of 10. You have to hit somebody so many times before anything resonates. If you’re sending a piece of direct mail, you better be hitting them on social media. You better have something else going on in the market, whether it’s a billboard, or a television ad, or something. You would have to be hitting people constant before they ever resonate and consider buying, unless you hit them in that right moment at the right time, which is again, can be very data-driven. That’s where you’ve played that line of cool versus creepy. Because if you get too creepy, then they’re like, “Oh, no.”
[0:25:17] DK: Yeah. Oh, you definitely want to be. My answer to some people who say that to me, I’m like, how many times do you think you could hit a full court shot on a basketball court, okay? Your probability is going to be pretty low, okay? Because you’re standing there, you’ve got one shot, you’re throwing it 90 feet, and you’re trying to hit it into this very small thing. That’s a tough shot to hit. If you start to move closer and closer and closer and you take more and more shots, you’re going to hit a heck of a lot more, okay? Your percentages are going to go up, you’re improving your campaigns, you’re improving your data, and you’re improving the response rate that you’re going to get.
Don’t look for the Hail Mary homerun, insert your baseball, or football, or sports analogy here. Look for the small gains. Move the ball, get the thing down, into logical spots where your probability of success is so much higher.
[0:26:14] DC: That does have to do with the messaging and the design, and it’s not just mailing it. The printers could suggest to their customers that they maybe split up the mailing and tell a story in three parts, or lead people towards a holiday purchase, or to something that’s coming up. As Will said, hit them in different places where you can track them from the website and stuff.
[0:26:39] WC: One thing, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But just to simplify something really quick. What we’re talking about here is the difference between sending 5,000 pieces versus sending 500 pieces, right? If you have the same data points, but you fine-tune it more, and you have very high-targeted 500 people versus semi-targeted 5,000 people, you’re better to do the higher-targeted 500 people, because you’re going to get a better result.
[0:27:05] DC: Of course.
[0:27:05] WC: Spending time sending more marketing campaigns to those 500 people instead of spray and pray to 5,000 people.
[0:27:11] DC: Correct.
[0:27:12] WC: So sorry to interrupt you, Deb.
[0:27:13] DC: It’s okay. You just have more qualified consumers, or customers on the other end. It’s still the right message at the right time that is going to move them to something. There’s some things printers can control, there’s some things that they can’t. Making the suggestion, and I love the basketball analogy. I am totally stealing that from you moving forward. As long as we’re talking about data, something that I’m asked to present on a lot, something that is misunderstood by the print customers out there, is that they think that print is not trackable in any way, shape, or form, because they’re used to digital marketing and all the data that comes around that and their websites and the robust data that comes around that. Now that stats and tracking are pretty much table stakes in the marketing world, how does bringing that same accountability to print redefine its relevance in our result-driven, data-driven world?
[0:28:16] DK: Yeah, this is good. If somebody comes to me and says, “Oh, you can’t track mail, or you can’t do it,” that person is just not trying, okay? To be very blunt and honest. Because there are so many things that you can do and you can incorporate into your mail piece and that come through – You can take advantage of through the process. You can have an equal amount of information and data feedback to your piece. Let’s start with a couple of things on the very basic levels and build up from it.
Very first and foremost, when it comes to the United States Postal Service, they have a process called informed visibility that will feed back to whoever was listed as the mail owner. You do have to set this up, but it is a free service. It doesn’t cost you anything. What you do is you embed within the IMB, the squiggly, not all the lines that are underneath of your CME address panel, that is when a piece of a mail goes through a USPS piece of equipment, it is going to scan that barcode, and that barcode is unique to that mail piece, and it is going to go back through the system, and it’s going to say, this was scanned at this piece, this piece was scanned at this location, at this time, etc., etc., and it’s going to have what we call an opcode, and that’s going to tell you what it did.
You can sit there and you can follow your mail piece, all the way through the postal service, up until it gets to the household. Why does this matter? Why do you care? Well, number one, that kind of information, depending on what your call to action is, what are you trying to do? When you’re doing a completely integrated campaign, you need to make sure that you’re doing a whole bunch of things. What’s your call to action? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to get people to call a phone number, visit a website, or go to a store? You are going to be able to know when you’re tracking these mail pieces, you’re going to see when they hit in home. When are people receiving it, when are they seeing it, when do they know what’s going on? That gives you the opportunity to plan whatever the coordinated steps are going to be.
Again, these things are not one and done kind of scenarios. They are all tied together. Will, you said it earlier, too. These multi-touchpoint campaigns, these multiple scenarios that you need to have of you’re driving, or coordinating an email with a direct mail piece that’s going on with an event that’s happening someplace. You want to make sure all that stuff is there. You need to make sure that your call to action is good. You need to make sure that whatever that call to action is, you are monitoring, okay? Are you monitoring web traffic? Are you monitoring phone calls? Are you monitoring store visits? Depending whatever your call to action is, make sure that you have the proper monitoring tools in place for that.
[0:30:51] DC: Hang on, Dave. You’re talking to the customers then. But of the printer? The printer can’t track any of this.
[0:30:58] DK: Well, the printer needs to work with the brand to make sure that these are the things that they’re doing. They’re using their best practices on their piece, number one and number two. Also, if you’re into building the variable campaigns with them, you need to be able to make sure that you have QR codes that have unique URLs, or at least URL tags that you can tell where that scan, or that website hit came from. You need to make sure that you’re recommending that, hey, do you want to use custom campaigns? Do you want to use Pearl campaigns to bring a blast from the past? What are you trying to do and what are you trying to make sure that you’re incorporated in here?
You need to make sure that you’re pushing your customer to do that. Because if the customer is not doing that, they’re going to blame the campaign, not themselves for failing, and they’re going to say, “Oh.” And how many times you hear all the other stuff of like, “I didn’t get any services.” Jamie said it before. “I mailed out 1,000 pieces, I only got 30, whatever.” They’re going to look at it as the campaign as a failure. You want to make sure that you’re really pushing your customer and they’re pushing your or to incorporate these things, because when it hits, they’re going to be back for more, okay?
[0:32:11] DC: Yeah. It’s like what they say, if somebody sells something, it’s great marketing. If they don’t, why are we using print anymore. Jamie?
[0:32:18] JM: You can also get in that line of creepy, like David said before. You can let your customer know these things will be – these drop and they’re hitting these houses on these days. They can be setting up emails to go out at the same time, or phone calls even where, “Hey, so and so, whatever.” You’re like, “How did you know I just got this piece of mail today?” To that pinpoint. Yeah.
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[0:33:26] DC: Dave, I want to get back to you for a second and I just want to stay focused on what printers can do, not necessarily how the customers can track on their end, because again, if you have a collaborative relationship and you can get them to give you some data, that’s wonderful. But I worked in advertising agencies for 25 years and we only know it worked, because they kept coming back for more. That’s all we know. The tools. Let’s just talk about the tools quickly. Then I have a question about marrying the campaigns together.
[0:33:56] DK: Absolutely. There’s more tools that we can talk about here that can be brought into the campaigns of the product. The informed visibility, absolutely. Become that data broker for that information. Make sure that you set that up, because there are just going to sometimes be people who don’t know how to do it. What I’m saying, the customers don’t know how to do it. Be that advisor. “We can do that for you.” The most successful people and the most successful companies always solve a problem. That is the most important thing that goes on. When you see something that goes on like this, or you see customers that aren’t doing that, solve that problem for them, okay?
Informed visibility. Make sure that you can ingest that data, you can turn it into something and you can hand it back to them. Having that data is enormous. They also have another informed delivery of USPS. They can do campaigns. Help them manage those campaigns where they can get an additional touch point with their customers.
The most important part of the process is the data. We’ve been talking about the data. The data is the most important thing. Make sure that you are continuing to be at that nexus point of where these things come in and provide back those services of everything from collection to analysis to promotion for what you’re going to do next. Okay, now I got this. What do I do with it now? Make sure you’re able to answer that question for them. Always be one step ahead of them. That is how you’re going to be able to differentiate yourself from finding yourself talking about a per thousand piece, which so many people unfortunately fall into and get into. How much does this piece cost?
Then you get into, well, what is the value of this piece? What value does this bring to me? When you can have that conversation with your customer and you’re supporting that customer with all of those things, from the composition to the data flow, the monitoring, and then is basically start analysis, those are the ones that you’re going to see, or those are the services that you’re going to see that are going to make a difference, that are going to keep people coming back.
[0:35:58] DC: Yeah. I just have one quick thing, because it was something you mentioned before we move on. There was a time working in the agencies, you know, exactly what you said. I mean, it was different then. You had a website up, you had a call center, there were people there, you knew that the mail was going to arrive on a certain date, guaranteed. I don’t know how it was guaranteed, but it always worked. Now, I don’t know. From my normal human experience, I’m just saying, I mail things to people, and if it gets there within five days, it’s a good result.
Also, I have to say that, I don’t know if it’s just my particular sorting center, but my envelopes have been destroyed lately, like scraped. Almost like the paper is peeling off, and it’s still attached. I’ll put the damaged mail to the site, because nobody could do anything about that. But how could a printer guarantee that anything is going to meet up on that date when the post office is involved?
[0:37:00] DK: Yeah. Oh, this is a tough one. Especially recently, it has definitely been a challenge. I’m sure everybody who’s listening to this, who works in print and mail is nodding their head right now like, “Oh, yeah. It’s definitely been interesting.” I’ll start out by explaining a little bit of the way that I look at it and dealing with the postal service. It’s like surfing, okay? You’re going to be out, you imagine yourself out in the ocean, and waves work in relative consistent patterns. Sometimes they’re a little taller, sometimes they’re a little lower. You always want to make sure you’re on the front side of the wave, you never want to be on the back side of the wave. That’s what happens, and sometimes you get hit with a rogue wave. It just happens sometimes.
What you want to do, or when you’re looking at something like this, you want to put yourself in a position like, yes, before you said, you can’t control some things, but you can put yourself in a better position to either minimize the situation, or to completely avoid it all together. There are a lot of things that we can do. We could have an all-entire podcast about just the different stuff that you can do. A few of them are, you have different entry ways to hand stuff to the post office. You can have different materials, or how you put stuff together, how you present it to the post office, and where you present it into the post office can be different.
There’s not a singular way to do it. There are a lot of options. You have everything from consolidators that can put mail together and handle it. You have comminglers that can then put York mail with other mail to reduce postage. They can do destination entry mail further into the postal stream, so the post office doesn’t handle it quite as much and you eliminate some of that variability. I like to call that one riding the roller coaster of the USPS. You do a local entry and that’s where you go up to the top of the roller coaster. Then your destination entry, or your destination and delivery is the part where you go down. The further you get into that, the more predictable those delivery times are.
The challenge is back to my wave analogy, you’ve got to pay attention, because it always changes, okay? The post office will do better, sometimes they will do worse others. You have to sit there and you pay attention to it. It is not a static one thing that you can do. It is, again, just like data we were talking about before, you have to pay attention to it, you have to stay on top of it all the time and adjust to the changes that are occurring.
[0:39:37] DC: I appreciate what you’re saying, but we don’t pay for waves, right? They’re free. We can decide which one we want to get on and ride. When you’re paying postage, it just keeps going up and up and up.
[0:39:49] WC: Does it though? For what you’re saying, if you’re getting into a different entry point, are you paying more or paying less?
[0:39:55] DK: Yeah. This is where you’re going to do. You’re going to pay less. If you do destination entry, you’re going to pay less.
[0:40:02] WC: Right. Because you’ve skipped some of their processes. That’s why we get bulk rates.
[0:40:05] DK: It is what the postal service calls work share discounts. The best way that I like to explain this is that if you do something for the post office that they don’t have to do, they’re going to give you a discount. If you start by just dropping something in the mail, the post office with a stamp, you’re going to pay much higher rate than if you do pre-sort. If you do pre-sort, or if you have your mail –
[0:40:29] WC: Be some dropship.
[0:40:30] DK: – validate things together, and if you dropship. There are a bunch of these kinds of things that you can do. This is what I was talking about. There are plenty of things that the providers can do that can help the campaign both save time and money to be able to do it. I can say right now, honestly, at Lob, within our team. I have 15 people on my ops team that this is what they do. This is what their job is, okay? We sit there, we make sure that we monitor all the time, where is the mail moving? Where do they have problems? What is going on? What is going to set up my campaigns for the best success of what we’re talking about here?
It is not just a drop it and hope for the best. It is looking at the current landscape, looking at those waves, but also saying, what is my best pathway forward with this? Because what it is today may not be tomorrow. The post office, yeah, okay, nobody likes postage increases. Nobody likes to see these things happen. We don’t like the same happen, because it’s counterintuitive to what we’re trying to build and what we’re trying to do. We would like to see, and we understand though, the struggles or the challenges that the post office has, and we do need to address them, and we need serious people and serious seats having those serious conversations about how to do that. That is happening. That is going on.
In the meantime, as the industry comes together, the industry also needs to be able to say, “Hey, this is what we can do and how we can support this and how we can make this go forward.”
[0:42:02] DC: Jamie?
[0:42:03] JM: I don’t know. I’m listening to it. I’m listening. I know the stuff that we do to get mail. I mean, we pre-sort it, we do this, we get better rates. We don’t take it to our local post office. We consolidate it and take it to the, I forget the name of it now, just skip my mind. That’s what I was thinking of, that’s why I paused. Yeah, we’ll bundle it all. When we do a lot of political mail, it has to drop at certain destinations to get it there quicker, because all their stuff is timely. You print it one day, it has to mail the next day and they want it to arrive the next day. If it takes three days, like, “Why didn’t my mail get there?” We dropped it at that town. It should be there already. We get those questions all the time.
There are, like Dave’s saying, and I’m picturing the waves, I’m like, there are waves. There are definitely, you can put it in a certain bulk mail center and it doesn’t get there when it should be, either they’re overflowed at that time, or you can get it at the right point and get it there, and it shows up a day earlier. I’ve seen it happen. I was just trying to picture it and just trying to – Yeah, I can see it and that’s what happens sometimes. It’s crazy.
[0:43:03] WC: That is the thing. Sometimes you hit it. Sometimes you don’t. When you spend the time in the business, like what you’re saying. When you do the campaigns, you’re going to have – that’s why we don’t talk about day deliveries. We talk about windows, and what we recommend about, when are you looking to do it and when do you want to have them, these things happen. Because as much as we can do all of this stuff and we can sometimes nail it and we can sometimes miss it. We’ve all had campaigns that landed early, but people usually don’t get too bothered by that. Like, okay, it was a day early.
[0:43:34] DC: Unless, they call phone numbers and there’s no websites up, then they get a little upset.
[0:43:37] JM: When it’s late, they want to see the day it dropped. They want that go smoothly. You proved that you dropped it on Wednesday the 4th and it got – why didn’t it mail when it should be? I’m like, “That’s the things that are going on the post office right now.”
[0:43:50] DK: I don’t want to ever blame the post office too much. I mean, they have an unbelievable task to do. The largest and also, all of the services that they do and they provide are substantial. Every one of us has our own little sliver that we look at, but they look at everything. They have a full 60-degree view of everything that they provide. Some of the stuff is we just don’t care about. It’s not letters, or it’s not postcards. It’s maybe it’s packages, or maybe it’s retail outlets and sales.
The full scope that they need to take into consideration is very broad and very wide, which is why I again say, it takes effort and it takes a lot of forethought to be able to get through a lot of this stuff.
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:45:11] DC: Dave, we’re going to wrap this up. Before we do, can you please talk more about the print delivery network? If I understand correctly, you work with regional print partners. What are the things you’re looking for when you are evaluating a new printer for your network?
[0:45:29] DK: Yeah. That is absolutely correct. Lob’s model is that we have a print delivery network that has strategically located facilities. When I say facilities, I’m talking about everything from a print facility to consolidators, co-minglers, logistics providers, all the way across the board, so that we can create what I like to call optimized mail. We want to make sure, back to what I was saying before, giving it the best opportunity to flow through for a whole host of reasons, from cost to time, to physical damage, avoiding physical damage on those pieces. They’re like, nobody wants to see a ripped and torn mail piece.
I like to say that I produce art and I want to deliver art to that final customer. I don’t want it delivered damaged. Then, yeah, those are the evaluations that we go through and what we look at, and it’s going to be all the things that we always talk about. Do you have good quality control over your pieces? The first thing I’m going to talk to people about, what do you do? How do you do it? What are the steps that you go through to make sure that you’re producing the same piece, or in a consistent manner? Consistency is so key in so many of these things. It is remarkable.
Because I need to make sure, and I’ve always said this like, I am taking someone’s one and turning it into a million. An agency, or a designer has put something together, they made this one layout, and now I have to go reproduce that a million times. I want to make sure that the first one looks like the last one. That kind of consistency is important.
These are the first things that I’m always looking at, number one. Number two, back to what I was saying before, being a thought provider, or being a thought leader and being out there and understanding the impact of this stuff beyond the ones and zeros and as a spreadsheet calculations in the per thousand costs. It takes a certain mindset to really be successful in these kinds of spaces, any kinds of businesses. You have to be able to buy to it. You have to be technology forward. You have to be embracing of change. The only thing that’s constant is change. Those are all the traits that we’re looking for to be able to have people do, because they’re also going to be the ones that are going to effectively do what we need them to do and then also, be ready for the next thing that comes down the line.
[0:47:53] DC: Excellent. Gentlemen, any final comments. Will?
[0:47:57] WC: I’m good. This has been a great conversation. I love direct mail. I really cut my teeth in my early years, starting in the printing industry, learning direct mail and data and then playing around with campaigns and seeing where it’s at now, where it was before and talking to somebody like yourself that has so much experience. It’s been a really great treat. Thank you.
[0:48:18] DC: Jamie?
[0:48:19] JM: It’s been a great treat. Thanks, Dave. I mean, yeah, like Will said, I started in direct mail back in the days of piggyback labels, where you would have two labels. They would pull the card off and be able to pull the label off and put it on their card and send it back to you. Crazy stuff like that. Remember those days?
[0:48:33] DC: This is reply envelopes. I remember those. BRCs. BRCs.
[0:48:38] JM: Yeah. There’s so many more questions I could ask for a bunch of other things. But no, definitely eye-opening. Definitely liked the things that you were saying about, how customers should look at their data and not just buy a list and think that’s going to be the holy grail. They need to comb through it and make sure it’s what they want. Great information. Thanks for coming on. I think we could probably elaborate this on something else further down the road.
[0:49:01] DC: I was just going to say, I vote for part two of this, because I have 55 questions about programmatic direct mail. Also, too, let’s give people some ideas next time on, we could dive into your study a bit and talk about the things that are working, the trends that were out there. I just saw somebody present about your study that one of your data partners presented a study, and it was fascinating the things that you can learn and how you can tweak them for a yogurt store on the street. Just because a giant credit card company is doing, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it, too. But if you don’t have the data, you can’t do anything. Everybody, work on getting data. Until the next time. Dave, thank you so much for joining us. You want to say goodbye to everybody, until next time?
[0:49:51] DK: Thank you for having me, yeah. It’s great to see you as always. I always walk away a better person when I get to chat with any of you. Thank you so much. This has been a thrill for me, too. I’m happy to discuss anybody who ever talks to me for more than 10 minutes realizes I love talking about this stuff. I’m happy to chat about whatever you ever need. Thanks so much.
[0:50:12] DC: Well, I’m going to continue to nominate you for the Postmaster General, and everything you need to connect with Dave and learn more about Lob is in the show notes. Until next time, everybody, direct mail long and prosper.
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[0:50:28] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts from the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com. We’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.
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