The Authentic Eccentric

It’s a well known fact among marketers that personalization increases response rates for direct mail. Back when I was still working with Stramull, we specialized in designing projects that used variable data printing - one of the stickiest parts of any project was making sure our data was properly scrubbed.

Obviously, the person responsible for scrubbing this data was not paying attention (if you look at the full size image you can see that it’s addressed to Ms. 804-3456 and then personalized that way throughout):

Lessons to be learned? If you’re going to dip into the variable data printing pool, here are some helpful hints:

• Buy data from a reputible seller who scrubs their data carefully;
• Make sure your own team carefully scrubs the data before beginning your merge; and,
• Use excel and sort by first name to ensure you have names, not numbers.