Combining years of industry experience, innovative print technology, and strategic partnerships, WebCE chose Varispark to provide a custom postcard mailing solution that:
- Met United States Postal Service (USPS) standards for more economical pricing structures
- Reduced the overall cost-per-piece for nationwide direct mail campaigns
- Provided more dynamic design concepts to complement customized messaging
- Created more targeted, effective campaigns through variable printing technology
- Built an eight year creative partnership with Varispark that helped advance and evolve WebCE’s direct mail campaigns
About WebCE
4Front Engineered Solutions (4frontes.com)WebCE is a nationwide online professional education provider that helps individuals train for new or advanced career opportunities. As an all-in-one provider of career training exam prep courses, continuing education for license renewal, career development certification courses, and corporate training solutions, WebCE helps today’s professionals not only achieve their goals but adapt to change across a variety of career fields. With WebCE, world-class education and career support is closer than ever before
The Challenge
After years of working with a traditional black and white business printer for their direct mail campaigns, WebCE needed to take their direct mail initiatives to the next level to better engage their customers and help drive business growth. This meant creating more targeted, personalized direct mail content that could be easily tailored to specific audiences in a variety of states, and using a better quality postcard that was more compatible with this variable messaging in order to help their offers better resonate with customers.
Because WebCE lacked the technology and resources to achieve this in-house, they needed a partner that could think creatively, technologically, and strategically about how to achieve this level of customization without complicating workflows for their internal marketing team — and while maintaining the healthy revenue stream generated from past campaigns. Their search yielded a number of potential partners who could provide the quantity and quality of postcard necessary for their mail campaigns, but WebCE experienced difficulty in identifying a printer who could handle the variable nature of their direct mail initiatives.
In addition, the varied nature of WebCE’s direct mail messaging had left the marketing team with more than 150 different templates that could take anywhere between 10 to 20 hours per week to populate for each separate campaign. This made for direct mail campaigns that were difficult to set up, execute, and track.
”We had tons of custom codes and processes, which made it difficult to train new employees on how to populate and send out the mailers, to say nothing of the complicated checks and balances to make sure the right mailers were going out at the right time.
Stacey CessnaDirector of Marketing, WebCE
The Solution
While this trifecta of custom direct mail needs may have been out of reach for some print service providers, Varispark was not only ready to meet these challenges but also to help WebCE simplify many of their internal set-up processes for advantages that extend far beyond individual campaigns.
The first hurdle we cleared was providing WebCE with superior postcards in the form of multi-color and coated paper products that could integrate with variable print platforms and where the design concepts could enhance the messaging of each custom piece. We were also to supply these durable, visually engaging postcards in the quantities necessary for mailing on a nationwide scale.
Then, using state-of-the-art variable printing technology, we were able to use customer data culled from custom contact fields that were both insightful and very unique in direct mail marketing. While standard data fields like name and state of residence were used, we also pulled more specific information such as:
- Discipline of study
- Timeline of coursework
- Previously used promotional codes
- Redeemed discounts
- Program fees
- And other speciality fields
Not only did using these data points help create targeted messaging that appealed to a variety of customer profiles, but it also helped WebCE demonstrate a depth of understanding about their customers’ challenges and needs while also helping them remain compliant with individual state regulations on direct mail campaigns.
Finally, we tapped into our strategic partnership with the USPS to provide pre-sorted mail pricing, which helped WebCE meet postal service standards for large-scale mailing campaigns. In addition, we used the USPS address validation tool to help optimize WebCE’s database of contacts and eliminate invalid addresses that had previously increased costs and decreased the ability to reach the right customer.
The Results
The verdict was in almost immediately and the benefits WebCE experienced in subsequent direct mail campaigns are still resonating today. Our variable printing technology helped WebCE reduce the number of in-house postcard templates from 150 to less than 20, which allowed WebCE’s marketing team to streamline their internal processes and more quickly train and onboard new employees. Additionally, our variable printing capability reduced direct mail campaign set-up time from 10 to 20 hours per week to a mere 60 minutes each week.
Plus, our partnership with USPS allowed WebCE to narrow their list of contacts to exclude incorrect addresses, as well as significantly decrease their cost per postcard through our pre-sorted mail pricing structure. This reduced the overall cost of direct mail campaigns through more efficient and strategic execution, and combined with personalized messaging via variable data printing, provided peace of mind that these custom mailings were landing in the right mailbox.
”The revenue from our direct mail postcard campaigns is a very important piece of our campaign strategy and accounts for 5% of our revenue… switching to Varispark allowed us to reduce our custom code process and implement more checks and balances within our system.
Stacey CessnaDirector of Marketing, WebCE