No doubt—getting a quick boost in sales feels great. However, the biggest profits come from long-term customers who provide recurring revenue over time. This is particularly true when it comes to investing in personalized print.
Here are five reasons to focus on recurring personalized print programs rather than “quick hit” campaigns:
1. Build relationships.
To establish a relationship with your customers, you need to get to know them. No one-off campaign, no matter how successful, can do that.
2. Learn about your customers.
At the beginning of a campaign, you make educated guesses about how your customers think and act. As they respond, you learn more about them. This allows you to modify your messaging, offers and calls to action to generate the most impact over time.
3. Generate more revenue.
As you learn which campaign elements are most effective at motivating your customers, your campaigns will be more profitable. More refined campaigns translate into higher response rates, higher conversion rates, and increased ROI.
4. Maximize investment.
Setting up your first personalized print campaign requires an investment in time and money. By developing programs rather than one-off campaigns, your set-up costs are amortized over the life of the program. As costs become amortized, your ROI per campaign goes up.
5. Program value is proven.
Unless you are the president or owner of the company, chances are you had to work with a team of others to make the initial decision to deploy personalized print communications. Each time you run a one-off campaign, you end up going through the entire process again. With programs, you have the freedom to refine and maximize your efforts without having to re-prove their value each time.

Programs allow you to develop and refine your marketing strategy over time and take advantage of the value of relationship-building. One-off campaigns can produce great short-term results, but the highest profits come when you invest in long-term programs instead.
