Businesses face a great challenge in ensuring that their messages stand out given the tremendous amount of direct mail that arrives in consumers’ mailboxes every day. Personalization is one way to stand out from the rest of the competition. The Maine Office of Tourism recently tested the Xerox 1:1 Lab, a variable print testing ground. It demonstrated that a relevant personalized mailing generated a 24.1% improvement in the response rate over traditional generic or static piece.

The Maine Office of Tourism projected that the personalized mailing also generated 23.4% more revenue from state visitors than the control generic group. The Xerox 1:1 Lab analyzes a customer’s traditional static direct-marketing campaign and compares the results against one that uses personalized, one-to-one messaging based on demographic data.

This helps print providers and their clients develop customized, more relevant direct marketing programs produced with digital printing that draws attention and increases response rates. For the project, the Xerox 1:1 Lab devised a test to compare response rates and business results from two different mailings that were sent to visitors who went to the tourism web site. The Xerox 1:1 Lab started in 2004 and is based at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada, which is one of the company’s most advanced research centers in the world for digital printing.

A.R. Adams and Son are a 120-year-old Dover-based commercial printer and the first in the United Kingdom to provide digital print to customers from the Xerox 700 digital press. The Adams Printers were also the first UK printer to install a Fujifilm Luxel V-6 B2 CTP engine back in 2004. Adams has also invested in XMPie software to provide cross-media, variable-data for its digital print output, providing more choice for customers.

The company already had a digital press but was experiencing issues like the curling of sheets off the press and it needed a lot of attention when stacking the input tray. The Xerox 700 resolved these issues as well as producing more acceptable results. The ability to offer personalized print to our customers with XMPie was a huge bonus with the Xerox 700. They could provide their customers with more cost-effective, accurate print for shorter run-lengths and include the value-add of variable data, including full image personalization.

Adams also has the full color-management package which improves their accuracy. Their history with Fuji goes way back and they knew Adams’ business and were able to advise the best possible digital print solution to meet their needs. The Xerox 700 is aimed at the production of photo books, brochures, direct mail pieces, catalogues, calendars, and postcards.

Printers need to be cautious in this uncertain economic climate as their clients may get scared and cut back. Compelling ideas that generate business will appeal to them. If working with retailers, price competition this holiday season will be relentless. Every retailer will not want to hold any inventory after December 25 because of fear that 2009 will be worse.

Non-retail clients are also looking at their budgets and squeezing the most out of them. Print businesses can be excellent outsourcers that can handle all kinds of fulfillment and management tasks that may disappear if companies cut or reallocate their staffing. It is a critical time for printers to take a hard look at their balance sheets and income statements because print prices will not be improving.

It is a good time to buy a competitor’s book of business as it is probably less reliable now than it was six months ago. Lack of profits of a print business can easily be blamed on rising paper costs, incongruous postal fees and other costs. None of these things can be controlled – only managed and navigated. The largest controllable cost in a printing business is labor and this is determined by the tools and training of those workers, and the capital investments that the business has made.

When a new type of lettering debuts on Northeast Ohio freeway signs next year, it will be easier to read from farther away, giving motorists more time to react. The new typeface is called Clearview and improves readability 20% over traditional highway lettering. The font was approved after 13 years for use by the Federal Highway Administration.

The font will appear next fall in Northeast Ohio as part of construction projects on Interstates 71, 90, 490, and 480. The lettering already appears on approximately 40% of the signs sold by Arkansas-based Interstate SignWays. The new font is an evolution of the old Highway Gothic typeface, which was created in 1949 by a traffic engineer who enlarged a mechanical lettering template. It was never tested for readability but was formalized in 1959 with the advent of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.

Since then, Hollywood Gothic has characterized the American landscape, in all-capital letters. Overglow, a haze caused by headlights hitting the reflective sign material, blurring letters, is the problem at night. In 1994, the solution was to make letters 20% bigger but that would cost billions of dollars in new structures and super-sized signs. At first, existing European typefaces were tried but when that did not work something new had to be created, using Hollywood Gothic as the starting point and then refining it with the aid of computer.

Prograf Digital Service (PDS) is a leading provider of exceptional service experiences, printing equipment and supplies. They recently announced a new service offering for equipment manufacturers – the fractional Service Engineer. Digital printing suppliers now have immediate access to a national network of exceptional, highly skilled product specific field service representatives to serve their local market needs.

Companies can partner with PDS’ trained staff at a fraction of the expense while improving response and uptime for their customers, rather than incur the costs of hiring additional service personnel. This concept was developed in direct response to the growing digital printing market’s demand for same day response and expanded service level agreements requiring specific uptime commitments. Prograf Digital Service has a large network of Service Engineers located throughout North America.

Manufacturers can now customize and scale their service and support programs to meet their client’s needs. Service Engineers are trained and certified on the supplier’s products and report directly to the manufacturer who dispatches them for installations, break fix service and preventative maintenance calls. PDS’ fractional Service Engineers solutions are priced on a combination of current customer base equipment installations, expected number of service days, size of territory, and forecasted sales growth.