The beauty of personalised direct mail

 We speak to Jeroen van Druenen, Commercial Director of venerable Dutch print company Jubels, about some of the firm’s most effective personalised direct mail projects.

“There’s often a sense of people seeing us as ‘just’ printers, so sometimes it’s difficult to sell our ideas,” Jubels’ Commercial Director Jeroen van Druenen says.

“But I have some interesting case studies from over the years that I can send to potential customers to show what we have achieved in the past, and this is what we can do for them now.”
Jubels, of course, is still very much in the business of manufacturing typical print products. But with direct mail personalisation campaigns – which Jubels started dabbling in back in the 1990s – Jeroen can tap into a more creative side and, he says, become a ‘partner in crime’ with customers and their campaigns.

“When print machines arrived that were compatible with WordPerfect, we were able to start making things personal and we could print 200 letters to a list of different people,” Jeroen says.

“We’ve come a long way since then. In 2004 we started using XMPie as a software solution to personalise both print and online with personalised websites, emails, videos and pictures. We are still a print company rather than a marketing company, but we operate somewhere in the space in-between as a service provider to marketing departments to help them reach their goals.”

The benefits of personalised direct mail, Jeroen says, are very clear.

“How many emails do you get daily? Too many – 50, 100? Emails go to the wastebox, then are deleted and they’re gone,” Jeroen says.

“But how many letters do you get? How many do you open? All of them, because you get so few. Most of the time it will be a bill or a bank statement but if you have a nice, printed piece, of course you might just throw it away, but first you open the letter or the package. If there’s a beautiful thing inside, it’s a way of getting more interest.

”One such ‘beautiful thing’ is perfectly demonstrated by a direct mail campaign Jubels undertook for Xerox to promote one of the company’s new print machines. The campaign involved personalised pieces being sent out to more than 400 potential customers. When the recipient opened the card, a fun 3D version of the print machine itself…