Not too long ago I wrote a guest blog for Printing Impressions about the Trade Show Road Less Travelled and spoke about my experience attending the Xplor Conference for the first time, and why I keep going back. Having just returned from the 2013 event last week, my conviction that Xplor is a hidden gem as far as conferences go is even stronger than ever!
This year the Xplor Conference and Vendor Forum had 60+ educational sessions and a before I got there a full pre-conference. There is no way to be at all the sessions, and quite frankly a bunch of them were way over my head or not relevant subject wise, but for two days I easily filled up my schedule with some really fantastic marketing offerings that every printer I know would have benefited from.
Although this year for the first time I actually felt like an Xplorer since I was part of the conference Educational Committee, as well as a return speaker and attendee, in many ways I am still on the outside looking in at this event. The conference pretty much focuses on the document and transactional document people, and as I said in my PI blog that is a polar opposite from the advertising world I come from. However, when you drill down to the basics of what is going on at Xplor, you are left with these two things from my perspective – Data and Direct Mail.
The conference is filled with people and companies who create the products, services and software that enable us to gather and store data, as well incorporate data into our printing – as in variable data. The bonus here is that the marketing sessions show you how to do it by presenting their projects – and this isn’t Printer X from down the road showing you a local postcard campaign– this is HP and Xerox and Canon and Ricoh working with the big brands who have partnered directly with them and the software vendors at Xplor to make global DM magic!
With all due respect to all the sessions I attended, and the presenters, a few stick out that I’d like to mention. The first is Relevancy Delivers in Multi-Channel Marketing, Presented by Shelley Sweeney, VP/GM Service Bureau/Direct Mail Sectors, Xerox. Besides just being an engaging and approachable presenter, Shelley showed us a few campaigns that moved beyond personal and into WOW territory. The highlight for me was Xerox working with the NY Mets to help them reignite group ticket sales. They did this by sending brochures to the companies who had previously made such purchases, and included IMAGERY and information from the games they attended! Anyone who has been to a ball game knows they welcome the big groups on the big screen – and since the stadium has a photographer and an image library they were able to find those shots and use them in the mailing, as well as highlight specific game information – sort of a nostalgic trigger – and it worked! I don’t recall the stats, but group sales went up exponentially.
Mapping the Success of Your Direct Marketing Campaigns, Presented by Rolf Richter, President & CEO, locr is another standout. Get ready to see MAPS on relevant Direct Mail. Rolf showed us amazing cross channel campaigns that utilized geo-individualization (ß learn it!) to further push the personalization envelope. I wasn’t so sure about this to begin with, to me there is a creepy factor as a recipient… but on the other hand it makes it very simple to see where you can test drive a car, or open a checking account for example, and because there is a map you do spend more time looking at the print. That can only be good news for the companies buying print for their marketing and promotions, and for the printers who offer the geo-individualized maps along with VDP and pURL’s and QR codes. Speaking of which, stay tuned, as I will have 50,000 – yes FIFTY THOUSAND – maps to give away in batches of 1000 so you can test-drive this technology!
No Xplor conference is complete without attending at least one of Pat McGrew’s sessions. This year I had the honor of sitting on her Social Media panel and attending The Top 10 Things To Do With a Print Head Presented by Pat McGrew, M-EDP, Production Mail Evangelist, HP. Inkjet is a pretty awesome technology and now that I’m getting to understand it better it makes total sense that Pat is right out in front of it. The big takeaway here was that you can still utilize all the bells and whistles and big quantities associated with offset, and leave open areas where you can utilize inkjet for personalization. This can be anything from addressing to location specific imagery to location specific QR codes and so on. Pat is the host for Xplor’s “Lunch and Learn” webinars so follow Xplor on Twitter to check those out, and for sure follow Pat who is always entertaining and informative!
The last session I’m going to mention is Good Products Don’t Sell Themselves, Presented by German Sacristan, Return On Marketing Developer Consultant, Kodak. This wasn’t personalization focused, but was by far the session that hit home the most for me since it was purely about marketing, regardless of what your product is. German made so many A-HA moment points during this extremely energetic and engaging session that to mention only these few does him a disservice, let alone I am beyond paraphrasing as well… Don’t sell products, address needs; Needs change ALL the time and you cannot sell based on what you’ve sold before; If a prospect doesn’t buy that doesn’t mean they are a bad prospect, and should be disregarded. They are still a good prospect, you didn’t sell them correctly; and my favorite – Message Matters! German played this video and I admit I became a crying fool:
Check out German’s book The Digital & Direct Marketing Goose: 16 Tips and Real Examples That Will Help You Lay More Golden Eggs
Like I said, there were plenty of amazing sessions and panels and presenters at Xplor and you can see them all here to get an idea of the educational span this conference has, and add it to your conference list for 2014! Im going to reach out to Xplor and the people above and see if I can get some encore webinars in the works through PMC so you can see, what I saw, and we can get in on the next level of making personalization more personal!
One Response
Deborah, thank you for your kind remarks. The event is only as good as the people that put together the curriculum and the presenters who share their experiences, the rest is simply logistics.
As you are aware the Education Committee is made up of both end users and vendors that understand the pulse of the industry. You had a daunting task this year with 128 speaking submissions to fill 60+ speaking slots. The committee did an excellent job.
The event is a hidden gem and my hopes are that many more will discover it. It is a community and you certainly have become part of it. Thank you for all you do.
Skip Henk, EDP
President/CEO
Xplor International