Unintentional Greening
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In my last post, I talked about how marketers can “go green” and actually reduce their costs in the process. Here, I’d like to give a perfect example. Club ABC Tours slashed its print mailing volume, thereby “greening” its print marketing program—and got an ROI of 10:1.
How did that happen?
Traditionally, Club ABC Tours, a membership-based travel club in the New York tri-state area, mailed static, undifferentiated catalogs to its membership base of 250,000. These catalogs ranged from 30 to 72 pages. With the average direct mail response rate averaging .5 to 1%, that’s 7.45 million to 17.8 million pages straight to the landfill.
Just imagine the environmental cost:
- Trees unnecessarily cut
- Fossil fuels and energy used to transport those trees to the paper mill and convert them into paper
- Fossil fuels used to transport the paper through the supply chain
- Energy used to convert that paper into printed products
- Fossil fuels used to transport those mailers to their destinations
- Environmental cost of landfilling 247,500 unread mailers
When Club ABC Tours decided to personalize its print marketing, it not only made its campaigns more effective, but it greened them, as well.
Working with Magjak Printing (Port Chester, NY), the travel club selected 20,000 high-value targets to which it mailed smaller, more targeted brochures. The club then customized and personalized the messaging and imagery based on customer status (active member, dormant member, prospect), as well as past purchase history.
To boost effectiveness, it used a series of personalized emails to prime the pump for the offer and nudge non-responders into action.
The results? The club got 150 new members (1% return on 250,000 mailers would have been only 25 responses!) and generated a return of more than 10 times its initial investment in just the first month’s sales.
Even with this higher level of effectiveness, the campaign had a carbon footprint less than 10% of its traditional campaigns (20,000 vs. 250,000). Plus, the personalized self-mailer boasted a lower cost per piece than that of Club ABC Tours’ typical catalog of trip options.
So, the campaign was more effective, less expensive per piece, and greener. Talk about getting a triple bang for your buck!