How you doing? Jay Eagleson here, from Hatteras out of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, representing the tri-state area, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. We are a full service, commercial print, marketing services company with everything from offset printing, digital printing, wide format fulfillment, full bindery, dye cutting in house, your full gamut.
And what we’re here to talk today, a little bit of the cross media side of our business, which we’ve recently, you know, as of two to three years ago, just started getting into, you know, helping our customers do direct marketing, incorporating the web, email, and now mobile devices as well.
About two years ago, we decided we wanted to get into these new cross marketing mediums, give our customers a taste of what’s new and what’s coming out, you know, not just ink on paper any more, give them something to accompany their ink on paper products that kind of brings us into the new age and where everyone’s kind of living right now, so, you know, on the internet, on their mobile phones.
So we invested in XMPie about two years ago, we’re, you know, fully installed, full blown, and hosting everything out of our facility. Everything went smoothly. And for about the first year, I was out with our, about 17, 18 sales reps educating the customer, getting them familiar with, you know, what some of these new terminologies are, what we can do, how we can improve their direct marketing, and improve their track-ability of their, specifically direct mail campaigns.
So, again, it really was about a year education for these customers and, you know, just this past year, I had a customer agency do about 50 micro sites and direct mail campaigns with us, all with full reporting. Some other customers, we did some high volume work, we did a campaign for an automobile company, about 300,000 pieces, full tracking, you know, interactive landing page for customers to provide feedback about the vehicle. Really incredible stuff and this past year has been customers reaching out to us more, so I’m hoping a lot of that education paid off. They’re knowing the questions to ask now, people are getting more familiar with print service providers providing these cross media services and providing the tracking, the data management and the reporting.
So it’s been a really kind of successful year for us this year. You know, we’re looking to leverage some of the newer stuff, some of the Uvideo we’ve seen today, with some personalization in video production. And of course, the mobile devices, we do believe that a lot of our customers are going to be investing in marketing on the mobile side and creating mobile friendly landing pages that’ll let customers interact and respond to campaigns where they want to.
Of course, we’ve got the QR codes this year, been huge, you know, I walk around the shop all the time now and there’s always a piece in the shop with a QR code on it. And we’re pushing, you know, some of the personalization side of that where they can track who clicked on the QR code, you know, not just the masses and how many people are clicking, but specifically what customers are clicking on the QR codes. And we report all that information back to our customer and, you know, they have warm leads, hot leads, and they can use all that information to then, you know, reach out to that customer, how they feel needed.
Some advice I would have for, you know, print service providers looking to, say, make an investment to the cross media services, do understand that, you know, it is, you know, a big undertaking. You have to get your production managers, your CSR’s, your sale people are typically used to selling, you know, just print and you got to get them familiar with some of the terminology. And what we’ve done is, we kind of have our salespeople know the questions to ask, what to look for, and then we bring in guys like myself and the team that works with me to kind of pick a little more, help these customers concept these campaigns. So it is definitely a much different sale than, you know, getting a quote request and making sure your price is okay.
So we did spend some time, we were early adopters to the game, we feel, and we did spend a lot of time educating our customers, but we felt this past year that that’s kind of come to fruition and customers are starting to come to us with questions and kind of, we made ourselves look like the experts in this category.
So definitely understand that it’s a big undertaking and, you know, there will be different ways to look at projects and customers will be seeking to you for advice.