Document Projects. Marketing & Customer Communications Management

Full Colour Variable Printing and its use in one to one marketing October 18, 2008

Colour printing is now viable. Over the last 4 – 5 years, offerings from the likes of Xerox and OCE have brought down cost per page and enabled efficient full colour printing at fairly high production speeds.

However, whilst cost per page is lower than it has been, some users of full colour printing are estimating that costs can still be up to 4 times as high as straight forward monochrome transactional printing. This suggests that judicious use of colour should be a consideration.

There have been a number of challenges with colour printing in a variable data environment. Getting the colour right not the least of them. One of the bigger challenges specifically with variable printing is the fact that each printed image changes. This means that all the graphics have to be loaded with each page, and in full colour, graphics are what you want. With a colour graphic likely to be anything between 5 and 15mb and with the potential for a number of these on the page, you can see the performance drag on big variable print runs.

Now, with printers and print streams supporting the concept of object embedding, it is now possible to overcome this barrier meaning that full colour customer communications can be a reality.

It seems that it is all about careful use of colour. Too much and you lower the value of the document, too little and things don’t seem right. Perhaps the answer is to deliver print streams by market segment. So those with the most to spend get the high quality colour documents those with little growth potential receive the old style monochrome documents.

One thing for sure is that full colour will improve response rates and customer loyalty. Breakdown of bills using summary pie charts, graphs and other illustrations in full colour is useful for the customer and helps them to better understand how to work with you. On page promotions will certainly get better results with the opportunity to place beautiful graphics that sell your product in the best possible way.

Combine full colour printing capability for variable print with the latest capabilities in one-to-one document creation software  and you can see that we are on the verge of an exciting new era in high volume transactional output.