The Printing Industries 20/20 breakfast seminar at Rydges Parramatta this morning saw Pitney Bowes Australia marketing and business development director Michelle Sheehan give a marketer’s perspective of how printers can increase their revenues with simple communication management.

One of Sheehan’s key warnings was that printers needed to communicate better with their existing client base, instead of expecting business to come through the door simply by upgrading their technology offering.

“You’ll be surprised at how much business is in your existing customer base,” she said. “When you get a new piece of technology, you don’t always have to find a new customer, because new customers are a lot of work.”

“People need to know your capabilities: what you can do for your customer and how you can help them. If they don’t know your capabilities they will ask someone else, and you could miss out on revenue opportunities.”

Sheehan said a strong marketing platform was essential for leveraging the advantages of acquiring new technology.

“One of the things I discovered when speaking to printing companies is that they say things like ‘we want to get into web-to-print’ or ‘we want to get into photobooks’, but sometimes when we get these new technologies we don’t know what to do with them.”

Sheehan put a particular focus on the benefits of using mail effectively, suggesting that printers include flyers about their new technology offering in whatever jobs they might send out to clients. She also suggested that printers should use direct mail itself to showcase their direct mail capabilities.

Sheehan said that maintaining an accurate database is of particular importance in direct mail campaigns, although this can involve labour-intensive processes such as finding and erasing duplicate entries.

“Undeliverable mail means that the goal of that mail piece is not achieved,” she said. “The last thing you want to do is send something out the door and have it come back. It’s basically throwing money out the door.”

Sheehan was followed by Australia Post marketing consultant Michael Durie, who declared that mail had become an under-rated means of communicating with consumers.

“There are 10 million letterboxes in Australia, and they are far from saturated,” he said.

Durie admitted that direct mail had been “tainted” by its association with the term ‘junk mail’, but claimed that consumers are “still engaged” when they have a tangible printed product delivered to them, as opposed to digital communication.

“Technologies like the iPad still have a long way to go to be something you can read at the beach or at home on the couch,” he said.

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