Direct Mail Strategy Evolves to Full Variable Versioning | Retail

4/16/2020 RRD

Micro-targeted campaigns elevate performance levels for retailer's reward mailings

CHALLENGE

A large national retailer continually pushed to improve results for their direct mail programs. They understand that personalization is the vehicle for delivering the type of relevant offers their customers expect. And they, in turn, challenged RRD to help them develop new and effective micro-targeted campaigns to advance their efforts toward elevating performance levels for their reward mailings.

SOLUTION

Examples of mailed advertisements Over the years RRD has worked with this customer to assist in the evolution of their mailings from one-size-fits-all to full variable versioning.

This involved many rounds of testing to continually improve format design, content and offers and customer scoring and ranking — all to find the best combination to increase monthly net customer gains. reward mailings.

RESULTS

28% sales increase

17% increased ROI

This retailer has been able to achieve a significant improvement in results year-over-year using these strategies. In fact, incremental sales have improved 28% in 2017 as compared to 2016, and ROI has jumped a whopping 17% in that same time frame.

2015: They were sending the same mailer to every customer with minimal personalization.

2016: They started versioning their mailings and included 4 to 10 static thematic versions per campaign. Each version featured a static set of offers.

2017: Mailings have become fully variable with 4-color dynamic content throughout. Every customer now gets a unique combination of store-wide and item level offers.

2018: Looking forward, this retailer intends to focus efforts on improving relevance even more by: