Business News
Intelligent Colour Launches to 200 International Guests
Friday 03. April 2009 - Polestar welcomed some 200 people to the official launch of its Intelligent Colour service last week, with the UK's first Océ JetStream 2200 providing the backdrop at Polestar Direct, the group's facility in Nottingham.
Intelligent Colour offers a powerful personalisation and digital printing service to provide customers with a range of solutions from cross media to transactional mailing. Representatives from all the sectors currently using or exploring this technology were amongst the guests, including the financial, retail, publishing, telecoms, mail order and home shopping markets, as well as utilities, loyalty, agencies, and print management organisations.
The Océ JetStream 2200 formed part of a wider £4 million investment in technology that lends itself to the market demands and concerns over quality or production from previous generation technology are no longer there, as Tim Smith, Managing Director of Polestar Applied Solutions, explains: “Our investment and the complementary Intelligent Colour solution have been well received, and we are delighted with the enthusiastic response from customers and prospects alike. Digital technology is now capable of providing full colour, high-quality documents at high speed which, combined with transactional data, can achieve fully personalised messages and customer-specific promotions. “
He continues: “Under the Intelligent Colour umbrella, we have a full range of disciplines from sheet to high speed continuous in both toner and ink jet. With this, the time is right to take advantage and we are looking forward to building on the early interest from a number of companies who wish to optimise their transactional relationship and marketing communications.”
As part of the presentations given during the Open Days, attendees were given live Home Shopping ROI case studies of the benefits of colour and an overview of relationship marketing, including the volumes of digitally produced items and the benefits of personalisation. The key points made were:
Currently, five per cent of the 460bn A4 pages per year are produced digitally. By 2014, it is likely to be closer to 10 per cent with a reduction in overall volumes.
In transactional print, of the 120bn A4 pages currently produced, only two per cent are full colour. By 2014, that is expected to be 10 times that amount with a very steep growth.
Within campaigns, personalisation can increase response rates up to 13 per cent, whilst by re-engineering and personalising documents by trans-communication, revenue can increase by 62 per cent.
In monthly statements, 96.1 per cent of people review their monthly statements, with 21.8 per cent of people spending more than five minutes and 50 per cent of people spending up to two minutes on it.
63 per cent of people like the idea of having advertising in the white space of the monthly statements.
On average marketers have only three seconds to make an impact, with only a further 12 seconds for recipients to form an opinion and/or make a decision.