According to recent data from the Direct Marketing Association, direct mail generates significant response. When using a house list, marketers can achieve a 9% response rate. The rate for prospect lists comes in at 5%. The conditions driving these rates are consumers’ high trust in print and their preference for receiving direct mail promotions over digital.

Yet, despite these obviously strong response rates, some brands are still hesitant to commit to direct mail. They cite its high cost and prolonged production process as two factors influencing their decision. But the most often mentioned reason for not fully investing in direct mail is a perceived lack of trackability.

Some marketers question how they can accurately monitor the success of their direct mail campaigns. They can’t seem to quantify their return on investment, and it can be hard for them to precisely attribute sales and leads to their campaigns since many other factors can contribute to conversions and customer inquiries. In actuality, with proper planning and an understanding of the approaches available, you can easily measure the effectiveness of your direct mail.

The importance of tracking and measuring your direct mail campaigns cannot be overstated. Without measurement, you won’t know how well the channel works for your product or service. Luckily, there are several ways to measure effectiveness. The challenge comes in setting up detailed tracking methods prior to your mailing and sticking with them over time. Just be sure to keep in mind that all points of contact on your direct mail piece—phone number, web address, etc.—should be considered trackable.

The simplest way to measure response doesn’t take much effort at all. When you communicate with a new customer or prospect, ask them how they heard of you. The same approach can be taken with your online forms. Include direct mail among the options that customers can select to answer this question on whatever form they’re filling out.

Other ways to track direct mail include discount codes and campaign-specific URLs. With discount codes, your customers provide the code from their direct mail piece when they make their purchase. You can know right away how successful your campaign is by measuring the number of codes used. The same can be said for campaign-specific URLs. By putting a web address on your printed piece, you can direct recipients to a landing page or a specific page on your website. Then, using your website analytics, you can see how many visitors followed the campaign URL to the destination.

Call tracking is another approach you can use. You put a dedicated phone number on your mail piece that tracks calls coming into your organization. An added benefit of this approach is the chance to record the calls. These recordings can then be used for quality assurance or customer service training.

In cases when a purchase is not made at the end of a customer’s direct mail journey, the next most important thing a brand can walk away with is the identity of the customer who expressed interest in the offer by taking some action that fell short of the purchase, like visiting a landing page. Methods such as call tracking, asking how a customer heard of you, and even discount codes can identify individual leads. Traditionally, other approaches, like a campaign-specific URL, have not been able to do this.

This is changing though. When customers used to receive your direct mail and visit your online asset, you couldn’t identify them unless they completed some type of form. With a new tool, you can now perform a match back to your mail list to confirm the recipients who visited you online.

Through a combination of cookies, IP addresses and other data, this tool can locate the physical address of a website visitor, which is then compared to your mail list to identify them. This opens a whole new opportunity for you to follow up with potential customers who demonstrated interest but for whatever reason stopped short of buying or contacting you.

Direct mail is highly effective, and marketers need to realize that it is measurable. Saying you can’t adequately measure direct mail is no longer a valid reason for not using such a powerful marketing tool.

Everyone knows that tailoring the customer experience to an individual’s preferences delivers a more satisfying interaction for the customer and builds brand loyalty. This holds true for print communications too.

Personalization in print used to be including a customer’s name in the piece. We’ve moved well beyond that today. Print personalization is much more advanced thanks to the evolution of data collection and digital printing technology.

By applying tactics to print that traditionally have been used in digital communications, brands can create materials that are more relevant, responsive and measurable. A new name for this type of marketing has even emerged—data-driven print.

Print is already a great medium for getting attention. Personalization builds on that strength. Research indicates that consumers are more than three times as likely to buy from a brand they’ve previously bought from than from one they don’t know. By personalizing materials, brands can remind customers that they have an existing relationship. This approach strengthens the relationship even more and makes customers feel valued.

Personalization can take on many different forms. Previously, personalization was limited to text. At this point, colors and even visuals can be tailored in a piece based on customer data. By personalizing visuals, you can increase your connection with a customer since visuals are usually the first thing that grabs attention in print.

Incorporating personalization into your campaigns will increase their effectiveness because more relevant print definitely increases engagement. This is incredibly valuable in something like direct mail, which has recently been one of the top channels for acquiring and retaining customers.

To be able to personalize print successfully, brands need to have access to a solid set of customer data. You can customize print based on data such as purchase behavior, product preferences, customer demographics and even web browsing history. Brands that have acquired more customer data points have more customization options open to them.

The benefits of personalized print make it worth the effort to grow a customer database instead of relying on purchased lists. Buying lists will never give brands the specific types of data that make print communications most relevant. Brands will achieve better response rates and increased ROI by collecting their own data and using it to build personalized customer experiences.

There are a lot of reasons why marketers should include print as a valuable part of their integrated marketing campaigns these days. One of the more influential ones is the consumer belief that print is more trustworthy than digital communications. In this age of widespread digital deception, people do not think of print as “fake news.”

According to a Two Sides survey, U.S. consumers believe print is a safer, more secure and more trusted medium than its digital counterpart in almost every way. Contributing to this trust is print’s comparative lack of use and the historical journalistic standards associated with it. For example, print magazines are rated as the most trusted news source.

In contrast, only half of people say they trust the internet. Disinformation currently runs wild across social media in an attempt to influence users and create division. In the same Two Sides survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents say they are concerned with the spread of “fake news” on the internet.

Besides being untrustworthy, digital communications are getting ignored. Online pop-ups are the most disliked form of advertising. Additional Two Sides data indicates 68% of consumers don’t pay attention to online ads, and more than half admit they try to avoid them at all costs.

This presents an opportunity for marketers.

While digital communications certainly aren’t going away, wisely integrating print into your campaigns can pay big dividends.

For one, it provides a chance to associate your brand with a more trustworthy mode of communication. Additionally, print has been shown to increase message recall. It is widely accepted that handling paper and turning pages makes us remember more of what we read.

Furthermore, print is just plain effective. Nearly all shoppers say they prefer print marketing when making a purchasing decision. And, almost 80% of consumers will act on direct mail immediately.

Undeniably, no one uses print anymore to steal your identity or trick you into handing over your bank account information. While it may not be completely out from under the old adage of “don’t believe everything you read,” we can certainly say if you’re reading something in print, you can probably trust it.

For marketers, this means if you have something important to say, you should really say it in print.

For years, commercial printers have told graphic designers to convert RGB colors to CMYK before packaging your files to send to print. This is to make sure you can accurately see what the colors you are using will look like in print, since your computer monitor displays color in bright RGB while print uses CMYK. This conversion is no longer required in all cases.

No harm will be done if you stick to this old habit, but advances in printing workflows and growth in the use of commercial digital printing have eliminated it as a necessity. Some modern printing workflows even prefer files with RGB colors.

RGB and CMYK are the color processes everyone is familiar with. RGB is an additive process, meaning it adds red, green and blue together in varying amounts to produce other colors. CMYK is a subtractive process. Different amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow and black are used to “remove” reflected colors from paper to create other colors we can see. The two processes have different ranges of color, with RGB providing a wider array of possibilities.

RGB is used in electronic devices, like computer monitors, while printing uses CMYK. When RGB is converted to CMYK, colors can look muted. Designers were often disappointed when their printed piece looked different than what they had been seeing on screen. To avoid this disappointment, printers told designers to convert colors to CMYK so they’d see them more accurately on their computer.

Now, modern workflows allow printers to use color profiles that automatically match CMYK ink to RGB values to produce results that are much more similar. Additionally, commercial digital printers can use inks beyond just CMYK to closely match the wider color gamut of RGB.

Designers actually gain some added benefits under this new approach. RGB files tend to be smaller; it’s always easier to move and manipulate smaller files. Since most designers today design for print and digital applications at the same time, keeping files in RGB gives you more flexibility as well.

If you’re not sure if you can to let go of this old habit, check with your printer. They’ll tell you whether their workflow still needs you to convert or not.

Pocket folder design can be one of the more bothersome tasks for a graphic designer if they have not created one before. Since the pocket folder will be produced with a series of cuts and folds, setting up the design file correctly can be challenging, but it is vitally important.

There are quite a few details to consider in pocket folder design, such as the number of pockets to include, how large the pockets can be, and whether to make the pockets straight, angled or curved. This says nothing of details such as whether business cards slits are required or if the folder will need some capacity to hold large or numerous materials. Then there are technical considerations, such as how large to make the tabs for folding.

At Perfect, we produce a number of custom pocket folders for various uses. One way to simplify pocket folder design is to use one of our print templates as a starting point. Using one of our folder templates can help eliminate the time of creating a new folder from scratch, as well as remove many of the variables that can be at play. Among the templates we have available for pocket folder design are one-pocket and two-pocket folders.