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.