RRD Facility Spotlight: RRD Marketing Solutions – Green Bay

12/16/2021 RRD

There’s something about the Marketing Solutions – Green Bay facility that makes life a little easier for RRD clients. Driven by a deep roster of experienced direct mail strategists, designers, and engineers, this location can deliver a full agency model whenever necessary.

According to RRD Creative Manager Mike Keane, one thing is certain: “This is not a conventional, hands-on lettershop environment.” And the access to expertise it provides is just the beginning. Mike took a few minutes out of his busy day to tell us more about Green Bay and its keys to creating new standards that drive response.

What about this facility makes it unique in the current marketplace?

Mike Keane (MK): The two things that immediately come to mind making Green Bay unique are its production platform and personalization capabilities — and those two things really go hand in hand.

From a production standpoint, Green Bay’s multi-printer platform excels at using multiple substrates to produce highly personalized direct mail. Our platform enables us to go beyond a two-way and three-way match. We’re producing five-way, six-way matches within a fully inline process. This is not common.

For an example of this level of personalization, think about something coming from a nonprofit.  An appeal mailer might include: an outside envelope, letter, reply form, all variably-imaged, varying donation amount checkboxes based on a donor's giving history, surveys, and personalized freemiums (e.g., address labels, calendars). Green Bay can make this happen in one mail stream.

Again, this is not a conventional, hands-on lettershop environment.

If you had to narrow it down to one, what do you consider Green Bay's forte?

MK: If I have to pick one, I would say personalization. There’s an emphasis on targeting in the direct mail industry right now, and it’s not going away anytime soon. And from where we stand, it makes a lot of sense. For our clients, typically, the more substrates personalized within a package, the higher the response rate.

And in the past, any time you had different print versions, it would typically create different mail streams. This raised postal costs. At Green Bay, our platform allows for the most versioning to be done in personalization within one stream, which can help keep postal costs lower and also  produce minimal to even zero paper waste.

We’re working with a client whose product line plays in two unique vertical markets, but we’re able to combine two lists into one for highly variable mail for both markets on one press within one mail stream using proprietary one-, two-, or four-color imaging, and high resolution technology.

Speaking of higher response rates, can you share a recent success story that showcases this outcome for a client?

MK: We worked with a national nonprofit interested in increasing the response rate of their 6” x 9” control package. We’ve found the size of a mailer can have a positive impact on successfully lifting response rates for a variety of vertical markets including insurance, banking, and nonprofit.

So our strategists recommended a series of incremental size tests against the control. The first increased the size of the package to 9” x 12” and used the same internal components — letter, free gift vouchers, and flyer. The nonprofit experienced a 23.5% increase in response with this larger package.
 
The response was even greater — an additional 18% from both acquisition and house files — when we tested into a jumbo flat (11” x 14”). The increase in response rate more than offset the extra postage and material costs for the larger size. 

But we didn’t stop there. A brief, personalized survey was added to the mailing to create a connected experience and further improve response. Adding the survey provided our client valuable, localized feedback as well as an additional opportunity to recognize the recipient with a “Thank You” gift or offer for their input and participation in the survey.

 

For more information about RRD's work in elevating how nonprofit organizations and associations engage with donors and members, visit our Nonprofit Industry page.