Printed documents remain a vital customer communications channel and represent a key component of an organization’s customer communications management (CCM) strategy. There is no doubt that paper is here to stay. While the volumes of digital communications, including email and text messages, continues to grow, the fact remains that a large percentage of customers still prefer printed communications. Based on discussions with our clients, Madison Advisors finds that printed communications are the preferred choice for more than half of all customers when it comes to highly personalized documents, such as those relating to finance and insurance.
Customers, both young and old, remain committed to paper. Surveys of the North American market indicate that approximately three-quarters of millennials prefer working with paper documents, as they offer a break from the digital environment. A MarketingSherpa survey found that approximately 82% of consumers trust print advertising. And more than half of consumers rely in part on direct mail to make purchasing decisions. A nearly equal amount dislike and attribute negative brand associations with digital advertising.
Printed communications act as the universal standard for customer communications. Customers who are uncomfortable with electronic systems or rely on others to assist with critical matters prefer printed documents, which are easy for them to retain, transport and share. North American customers who struggle with English find it easier to share printed documents with those providing assistance to them.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that 21% of American adults, or about 43 million people, have low literacy skills bordering on illiteracy. These individuals lack the reading skill to compare and contrast information, paraphrase and make low-level inferences. These individuals often rely on friends and relatives to translate or explain documents, which they prefer to show in printed form.
In addition, printed communications are accessible to disabled individuals. A significant percentage of people in the United States struggle with digital channels due to vision impairment, physical challenges and lack of access to digital resources. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 61 million U.S. adults, or one in five, live with a disability. Roughly 4.6% of the U.S. population suffers from blindness or has serious difficulty seeing, even with glasses. With the rapid increase in digital communications across all industries, these individuals rely on screen readers and accessible content to consume these digital documents. However, organizations delivering customer communications in a digital format need to take additional steps to make these documents accessible.
Print Persists
Printed documents have much greater staying power. Catalogs, newsletters and flyers often wind up on kitchen counters and dining room tables for weeks. For marketing purposes, the longer promotional material is in front of customers’ eyes, the more likely it is to convert prospects into leads. For transactional documents, such as bills, many customers rely on the paper bill as a reminder to make a payment.
Catalogs, newsletters and flyers all serve to attract attention and instigate an initial engagement with prospective clients. These materials can drive sales in their own right, but they can also help bring prospects to your website. You should consider any people who visit your site after seeing your print advertising as successful conversions. You’ve managed to interest them with your material and now you can continue your advertising efforts in the digital realm.
Some consumers want more than a rapid-fire spiel. They enjoy lengthier content that provides both breadth and depth. Standard mail advertising gives you a chance to reach these sorts of prospects. Newsletters can include messages from executives, as well as special offers and new products. Catalogs can spell out the company’s charitable initiatives. All this provides more value to readers.
Digital technology can leverage traditional tools in powerful and surprising ways. For example, who would have thought that direct mail would experience a resurrection? That’s exactly what happened when mailers were paired with a QR code that consumers can scan to learn more. Furthermore, unique URLs and QR codes allow marketers to gather extremely granular data, permitting them to develop robust marketing analytics regarding ROI and attribution, and eroding the advantage of digital channels.
Personalization in print/mail form, for a deeper connection to an organization’s customer base, is perceived as less intrusive than through digital channels. The immediacy of seeing one’s recent browser choices reflected in sidebar ads can be startling. Digital advertising models utilize personal data collected both with consent and without consent to drive the ad selection, whereas printed communications rely on the data gleaned from interactions with the organization.
Digital marketing channels rely on browser cookies. However, with Google phasing out third-party cookies on browsers and Apple implementing changes to its iOS 14 mobile operating system, organizations will no longer be able to rely on third-party cookies to identify potential customers. In addition, new and emerging data privacy regulations will force organizations to be more transparent in their data collection processes and explain how and when personal information is shared with business partners. Madison Advisors clients have already indicated they need to add privacy policy statements and detailed data collection options on their websites and customer portals to comply.
Optimize Processes for Better ROI
For financial services organizations and government agencies, which operate under state and federal regulations that mandate the production and mailing of printed documents, the approach has been to finely tune production operations. These organizations utilize a range of software tools and best practices to manage costs.
Of all the production challenges facing print and mail operations, postage costs are perhaps the biggest. Postage represents more than 75% of the total cost of printed communications. Print and mail centers manage postage with operational excellence. Document composition optimization works to both reduce page count and take maximum advantage of the pages available. Composition tools can organize documents by page count to create a print run suitable for the same size envelope.
Presort software groups together documents being mailed to the same mailing center or zip code. The United States Postal Service offers significant postage discounts to large mailers affecting a three-digit or greater pre-sort.
White space management solutions calculate the amount of blank space on each page of a printed document and add marketing messages or advertisements, which would otherwise be an additional slip of paper, into the available white space. Eliminating the need for an additional piece of paper in the envelope results in significant cost savings.
Instead of being viewed as a necessary expense, printed communications should be considered a valuable tool capable of delivering necessary transactional information, while carrying marketing messages. Printed documents elicit a more consistent response from customers and offer opportunities to connect to digital campaigns. If managed well and used correctly, printed documents remain a vital customer communications channel capable of delivering a better customer experience.
Richard Huff is Senior Analyst at Madison Advisors, an independent analyst and market research firm that addresses the needs of the electronic and print customer communications management marketplace. Visit https://madison-advisors.com/
This article originally appeared in the September/October, 2024 issue of Mailing Systems Technology.
