Fulfillment: At Your Request

Strategies for developing customized fulfillment kits

July 2007 By Hallie Mummert

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A best practice to implement in any personalized fulfillment program is for marketers to get back from their fulfillment company a status report after the processing of each data feed, Lowndes advises. This way, marketers have a record of what information was sent to which leads and for what purposes.

In today’s multichannel, multitouch environment, he adds, marketers need to be aware of every interaction with their prospects and customers so they can better serve them at successive interaction points.

With today’s capabilities, Altman asserts, it should not be a daunting process for companies to share their program data with call centers and other channel support partners to provide leads with a seamless experience.

“Marketers need to treat leads at the level of a customer, even though they’re still a prospect,” says Altman.

Turnaround and Set-up

All things being equal, it does take a little longer to generate custom materials, says Lowndes. But marketers can work ahead with their fulfillment company to optimize the process.

It’s best to do all the work in one location, since you want to reduce the chance for mismatched pieces and to obtain the quickest turnaround, he explains. Print-on-demand (POD) capabilities are important in this environment, even if you’re using pre-printed shells produced on offset presses and then personalizing with POD technology at the time of fulfillment.

The set-up of such a program can take anywhere from one to several months to assess the program’s aspects, determine costs based on production processes selected, put processes in place, test, further optimize and then go live, Lowndes explains. But the benefits are worth the wait. Lowndes has seen a 10 to 20 percent reduction in the time it takes audiences to respond to a customized piece, and similar increases in response rates are common, too.

Pitfalls to Avoid

The biggest challenge marketers face, says Lowndes, is recognizing that they might not be able to take their existing fulfillment process and just tack on customization aspects; sometimes they will need to adjust current processes for collecting data, sharing it with their fulfillment company and developing kit materials that lend themselves to customization.

And often, he says, marketers have plenty of communication strategies and design approaches but do not have the tools to put the needed processes in place. This is a critical aspect, because the automation of processes can make a huge difference to operational efficiencies and the final fulfillment piece.

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