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Details of Personalization
Any personalized or variable-information documents will be made up of three types of content:
Fixed - This means text or images that are repeated unchanged in every Copy.
Re-usable - These are text or graphic elements that appear more than once in a job, or in a sequence of related jobs, but do not necessarily appear in every copy. These can be saved in the RAID storage and called up when needed without having to be re-processed.
Disposable - Some text or graphic objects are only used once in the job, so are not retained in memory.
In a recent presentation, Frank Romano* an industry leader identified 12 levels of personalization used in targeted marketing.
- Addressed to “Resident”—same contents—every piece the same
- Addressed to “Resident”— sorted by state or zip with contents via selective bindery
- Name and address on envelope or mail piece; sorted by state or zip
- Address merge (name and address on letter and mail piece)
- Mail-merge (name and address and salutation)
- Document assembly (assemble pre-written paragraphs)
- Data merge (name and address, salutation, plus name or other data embedded in text)
- Database merge (link to all fields in database)
- Hybrid documents (personalized pages with static pages)
- Database and image merge (link to database and images)
- Rules-based database and image merge, plus dynamic layout
- Every pixel on every part of a piece or mailing personalized to the recipient
Clearly, levels 1 through 5 can be (and have been over the years accomplished by static printing technologies with overprinting of variable data. Levels 6 and above require the ability to create a unique form for each impression, what we are calling Variable Data Printing or VDP.
*March '04 IPA “Variable Data Printing What? Where? Standards!” by McDowell.
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