XMPie is a Xerox company, and in their own words they describe their product as ‘the leading technology for engaging your audiences with personalised, relevant communications across print and digital media touchpoints’. The software aims to integrate print and digital media and improve the ‘brand experience’. In this post we are going to take a brief look at six areas in which XMPie can add value:
Data-driven print and Variable Data Printing (VDP)
Cross media reach (ie marketing across several print and/or digital means)
Web-to-print (selling print online, any time of the day or night)
Campaign management (with tools to plan, see and automate multi-channel communications)
Creative tools (options to design within XMPie itself)
Adds-ons and ‘pro services’
That’s quite a list (we’ve checked it twice), and we’d like to dig a little deeper by creating a fictional example of a business that might investigate using XMPie technology, and why it would make sense for them to do so.
Bear with us here. It’s Christmas, after all…
Our company is Father Christmas Corporation Ltd. Father Christmas has got a lot on these days, with the population growing so fast, so he’s had to turn his North Pole base into an HQ and scatter smaller franchises around the world to keep up with demand. However, he needs all of his service-delivery teams to be on-brand, producing the right logos and artwork to the right quality, and spreading the same message across their social media and email marketing. What’s more, he needs to be personalising his letters (while keeping GDPR compliant in the relevant parts of the world, of course!).
Here’s how Father Christmas might make great use of the features of XMPie now he’s upgraded:
Father Christmas (or his designers) can use the XMPie plug-in with Adobe InDesign and use simple rules to replace static graphics and text. He can therefore put a picture of a bike and a correct first name on a response to a letter from one child and change the toy to a dinosaur or a dolls’ house or a mud kitchen for another, all the while maintaining the overall look and feel of his Christmas Communications.
He can also use XMPie technology to create, manage and monitor his annual campaign across print, email, web and SMS. Now, little Johnny can get a personalised letter in response to his letter to Santa, and his parents can get a personalised email telling them a reply is on its way – and both will have a consistent look and feel.
He’s an astute man, so Father Christmas knows that some parents might forget to send baby Maggie’s letter until past the last postage date. He also knows that lots of parents are working during the day and out spending quality time with their kids at the weekends. So he sets up a web-to-print solution allowing parents to request their printed personalised letters 24/7 through a storefront with end-to-end InDesign workflow. He also offers upsell opportunities for further branded merchandise, allowing them to upload images of their child’s face into an image of Father Christmas in his sleigh with an as-yet-anonymous passenger, all the while maintaining his branding. In addition, each of his franchises has access to pre-defined templates, set at HQ, to ensure their messaging looks like everybody else’s, albeit with local language, cultural references and images.
How does Father Christmas know which of his franchises are sending out the most print communications, or which of his channels are getting the most interactions? He uses XMPie’s analytics options so he can see which parts of his omnichannel campaigns are working most effectively and where he might want to adapt his strategy next year.
As he plans his campaigns, Father Christmas gets to know that he can do even more with XMPie’s creative tools. He could put in variable charts to indicate how many children will be receiving his gifts in that country that year, and extend his reach with Refer-A-Friend and Social Media Share features in order to send the joy of Christmas viral!
If all this weren’t enough, Father Christmas is looking to add mapping to his personalised collaterals, showing his sleigh icon on the child’s street using the XMPie Mapping Service (perhaps the route to the closest franchise-organised ‘Breakfast with Santa’ might be better!). He’s also had a look to see which of the professional services integrations are relevant to his organisation.
XMPie can grow with Father Christmas’ audience
The great news is that XMPie has scalable options, so Father Christmas can adapt his offer each year if necessary. Next year, he’s looking to introduce XMPie’s new video personalisation service.
Disclaimer: Father Christmas is actually pretty secretive. We don’t know whether he or his elves really use XMPie. But we do think it can bring a little bit of magic to your business, whatever the time of the year. Contact us now to request a demo and/or a free trial, or see XMPie’s recent video featuring the technology in action:
