Personalized print communication has become one of the most popular marketing services currently being offered by graphic communication service providers. Due to its popularity, the market for personalized communications has become more competitive. To remain competitive, service providers need to expand upon these existing personalization services to offer more complex applications, more powerful data processing, and cross-media capabilities. Substantial opportunity still exists in this area, but to capture it, the needs of marketers must also be addressed as new solutions and services are built out.

As digital printing has become commonplace across the industry, applications and services that harness the capability of providing unique output for each printed page continue to grow. In a recent InfoTrends survey, we found that around 62% of print service providers currently offer personalized, one-to-one print communication services, making it one of the most popular marketing services offered in the industry. That service offering has increased by almost 5% when compared to results from the prior year’s survey; significant interest in expanding into this area also remains, and it’s not surprising why it does.

InfoTrends tracks the U.S. print-on-demand market in a number of ways to help size the market opportunity for printers. One of those ways is by the retail value of digital printing; it comprises the total value of print produced by all establishments across the industry for color and black & white digital printing. We use this number to determine the retail value of variable data digital printing, which consists of data-driven digital printing that is used to enable personalized applications.