Software - VDP

The Xplor Document University’s educational road show came to Philadelphia in November, and IPG attended the one-day seminar. Though rain and traffic took a toll on attendance levels, the five speakers gave interesting and thought-provoking presentations.

In-plants have the opportunity to change the scope of their offerings by adding the same kinds of non-print services offered by many commercial operations. These new offerings—often termed cross-media or integrated services—typically involve some type of outgoing marketing offers or other communications to customers or prospects.

GALLUP PRIDES itself on its reputation for delivering "relevant, timely and visionary research on what people around the world think." To deliver much of that information, the 75-year-old organization depends on its 32-employee in-plant facility in Omaha, Neb.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been having great success providing variable data printing (VDP) with its Xerox iGen3. Now, thanks to a recent upgrade to an iGen4, the 42-employee in-plant will be able to provide that personalized printing at even better quality levels. In December, the operation installed an iGen4 digital color press. Operations Manager Geoff Larson has been very impressed with the results.

Success with VDP campaigns is not guaranteed. You have to design with your results in mind, then track and measure them.

As VDP evolves and becomes more accessible and understandable to a larger market, VDP providers such as ourselves are going to find that a “price matrix” (one size fits all) pricing method just isn’t going to work (or pay the bills).

THESE ARE challenging times for in-plants, as cost cutting, downsizing, department justifications and threats to outsource permeate daily business. Now is the time to strengthen your customer relationships and provide value-added services beyond conventional and digital printing.

If you are working with direct mail marketing, e-mail marketing (with or without PURLs), mobile media marketing, transpromo or collateral fulfillment and you are trying to personalize the material to improve the response, then you know it is not easy to pull it all together.

In-plant managers had two opportunities to mingle at the recent PRINT 09 trade show in Chicago. IPG and the In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association each held a separate session for in-plants. Both attracted more than 50 attendees, many from university and insurance in-plants.

Once their digital color presses are up and running, in-plants often discover a few things they wish they had known ahead of time. We asked six managers to tell us what they learned and what they wished they had done differently.