Case Study - Moving Mailer
The Brief
With moving to our new premises we wanted to send a mailer to inform all our customers of our new address.
We decided on an A5 postcard, with an image on the front representing a sign with our customers name on it and the distance in miles they were away from our new office.
On the back of the postcard would explain why we were moving and have all the new address details and contact information on it.
We also decided this was a good time to put a pURL (personalised URL) on the mailer, which would allow each customer to visit our website on a unique page containing a message personalised to them, giving them a link to google maps with directions and a map of how to get to us from them.
Getting the Data
To get the distance from our new unit to each of our customers we used the data from google maps:
A script was written to automatically scrape the data from the raw html, grabbing just the distance, importing it into our database for each customer and repeating for all customers.
This ran fully automated and took less than an hour to do.
Once completed we then exported the relevant data fields to a CSV file.
A section of the final CSV file looked like this:
Image Personalisation
We purchased the front cover image on istockphoto.com and with a bit of retouching created our master file ready for personalising.
The next job was to create a script which would automatically read each line of the csv file, take the relevant text for each sign and place that into the image.
Once in place it was distorted to fit the perspective of the sign and given a small amount of highlight and shadow to add realisim.
The image was then saved using a unique filename which was taken from the csv file for each customer - eg. ‘adam47-pic.jpg’
Once saved the image was reset back to the blank master version and repeated with the next line of data.
This was a fully automated process and left to run overnight - infact to process all 700 versions took less than two hours.
Page Layout
The main layout for the postcard was produced in QuarkXPress.
With the layout complete and the data linked, the job was then downloaded to the press.
On press each personalised postcard was printed along with three other postcards on to an SRA3 size sheet with bleed and crop marks.
The stock we used was Fedrigoni Symbol Card, a single sided board, coated on one side and uncoated on the other.
Once printed, all the sheets were gloss laminated on the image side, trimmed and posted.
PURL (personalised url)
To monitor the response to our mailing and to give each customer a good incentive to view our updated website, each postcard had a unique url added to it. This took the form of:
http://www.ripedigital.co.uk/move/pURL
eg. http://www.ripedigital.co.uk/move/adam47
Once a customer entered the url on they’re web browser they would be greeted with their personalised webpage as shown below:
On clicking the image of the sign (personalised with their name company name on it) a new window would pop up showing them directions and a map of how to find us.
Response
For every visit to the website via a pURL a log file was generated showing the time, data and number of times the pURL was loaded. This allowed us to track how many people visited our site as a direct response to the mailer.
Bearing in mind we were not offering anything more than a map of how to find us, just over 11% of people that were sent the mailer clicked on to our website via their pURL.
We also received dozens of phone call’s from clients saying how impressed they were by the mailer and how in the future they’d like to produce their own variable data piece.
