Marketing Automation is becoming a premium for small and large organizations. Over the past 15 years there has been increased pressure to squeeze the most one can out of their marketing dollars. Typically this falls into two camps, the actual money spent on marketing initiatives and the money spent towards the headcount to administer them.
The marketing automation dilemma
You essentially have a back and forth issue. You don’t want to strip headcount too badly, because it will be difficult to administer campaigns, but you want to maximize the amount you spend on external campaigns that drive people back to your site and drive interest.
The first step to solving this dilemma
So now you recognize you have this dilemma and the question of how to make strides to maximizing my headcount and at the same time spend money on initiatives that will drive revenue, retention, sign-ups or whatever your key success metrics are. What are the next steps?
Strip away non-value additive activities via automation
Busy work is the bane of anyone’s existence, but it should also be the first thing in your organization you look to remedy. Physically handling mailing items, stuffing envelopes, or even spending the time managing 3rd parties to do this isn’t additive. In many cases manual interactions not only increase the time that you spend doing other things, but also increase the chance of errors. The irony of introducing more manual work is that it introduces more errors that may require further work to manage. At the end of the day, outsourcing these operations to a 3rd party is crucial to improve efficiency. It improves efficiency for a number of reasons:
- You won’t ever be able to do something as effectively as a specialized shop – Typically if you are printing and stuffing envelopes, your cost per impression is much higher than a 3rd party shop. You have to consider the time for anyone babysitting the exercise of printing and mailing
- Print on demand vs. Inventory – One of the essential problems with all in house marketing activities is that you have to print extra and warehouse those extra pieces.
- Initiate from your systems rather than a spreadsheet – If you have systems for managing people and operations, then why are you exporting to a spreadsheet and manually hand holding the process to completion. It wastes time, while you could automate the entire process.
Enter a Print & Mail API
A print and mail API is the perfect solution to move manual tasks off of the plate of marketers and just making sure things “happen” on their own automatically. There are many marketing professionals that work at Printchomp. As marketers we understand what an ideal world would look like in the marketing realm, that was part of the reason why we developed our Print API and Mail API. We wanted to automate the flow of activity and take away the mundane tasks of getting stuff done.
Example Use Cases for a Print API
- Do you send out the same postcard to 1000’s of people based upon variable data?
- Do you have regular updates or announcements that need to go out via mail due to regulatory reasons?
- Do you feel that your manual method of managing high volume mail is inefficient?
- Do you have an app that has documents and would like to make it easy to send print directly to a network of over 10,000 printers?
Moving Down the Automation Continuum
The goal of our platform is to move printers and print buyers down the automation continuum. We recognize that a lot of people do pure manual ordering, both on the supply and the demand side. Our goal with any of our partners is to help them automate their processes so they can save time and be more efficient. To our printing partners, this means more business and higher margins. To our customers it means better prices, higher degrees of automation and less overhead. The web was a good first step, but ultimately the future of print will be integrating with an API at some point as more manual operations become more seamless.
Integration with the Printchomp API
Printchomp is currently in the process of integrating with multiple partners to have in solution support for automation. If you would like to talk about your current solution and how you could integrate with us, feel free to reach out to me personally at joseph@printchomp.com – If you would like to get started with an integration you can look at our easy Getting Started with a Print API guide.
Video – Marketing Automation via the Printchomp Print API
Joseph Puopolo – CEO of Printchomp and
Brendan Waller – Director of Marketing
Marketing Stats
- 30% of marketing budgets are spent on the creation of printed sales and marketing materials by
advertising agencies - The creative design process of these printed materials comprises about 40% of the actual
production time - Approximately 60% of production time is spent correcting and reviewing documents
- 30% of this time is wasted on searching and re-generating communication materials
- 90% of all printed communication materials are used only once.
“Marketing Communications Demand Creation: Marketing Executive Study”,
Barbara A. Pellow, et. al., Rochester Institute of Technology and keyorganization.com