Anton Group has partnered with creative agency Nutshell Creative to develop its multi-channel offering, with the agency’s EFI DirectSmile software having a big part to play.

The need to offer marketing communications across multiple channels has seen Anton Group in Essex partner with a creative agency, Nutshell Creative Marketing in Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes. It has allowed Anton to position itself as a Marketing Service Provider (MSP), and key to the whole deal has been EFI’s DirectSmile Cross Media software.

Executive chairman Malcolm Lane-Ley joined Anton Group at the start of 2013, and had a good idea of the business’s capabilities. ‘I knew it was a great business focused on growth in direct mail and personalised communications,’ he said, ‘and that we had already developed a unique hybrid process for high volume litho colour print with mono personalisation. When coupled with being the largest Kodak digital print facility in Europe, this made us pretty formidable in being able to offer personalised, variable print solutions to clients at both ends of the spectrum.’

Another dimension was needed though, if Anton was to carry on being successful in a market where digital media were presenting additional opportunities to clients. ‘I knew we needed to be able to offer a package that allowed communication strategies to be delivered across multiple channels simultaneously,’ he continued.

‘It may seem counter-intuitive for a print company to be doing this but taking control of the whole campaign not only provides the opportunity for increased revenue streams but ensures, critically, that we remain in the driving seat and producing the print element, which is often the highest value component when postage is taken into account. It’s the print that’s the attention grabber, the call to action that drives the use of online technologies to complete the total effectiveness; it is where you gather more information about your target audience and subsequently build campaigns with better targeting and an increased ROI.’

 

Agencies on parade

Nutshell Creative came through a ‘beauty parade’ of creative agencies in 2013, and Mr Lane-Ley says the agency – led by managing director Lucy Swanston – stood head and shoulders above its competition in terms of understanding what Anton wanted to achieve and how to do it.

‘The deal maker was when Lucy offered to partner with us to take Anton forward as a full marketing services provider using DirectSmile at the heart of our cross media marketing campaigns. This move elevated Anton from being a class-leading, innovative DM provider into a fully-fledged MSP, but with a tremendous all-in-house manufacturing capability behind us to back up our key value proposition, which is speed to market.’

Nutshell has subsequently carried out a number of cross media executions for Anton using the DirectSmile software. One of these was a customer survey for Anton itself, that sought to gather key information that would enable it to refine its market proposition. Nutshell Creative designed and deployed a cross-media campaign using direct mail and email communication. Automated triggers kept the conversation flowing, and personalised notebooks were sent as a ‘thank you’ to those who participated. A 35% response rate was achieved.

EFI DirectSmile allows creatives with no programming skills to set up sophisticated personalised campaigns with real-time response and analysis. It can be used to manage campaigns, launch websites, send emails and SMS texts and generate personalised print files. It was sold to Nutshell by Transeo Media, which continues to support it.

‘We wanted to focus on three things for marketing: personalisation, customisation and measurability for marketers,’ said Lucy Swanston. ‘After extensive research looking at several cross media system suppliers, and also looking at extending our web to print platform, we chose DirectSmile as it gives us flexibility. It has won us significant new business that’s enabling us to grow.’

Nutshell’s senior designer Tony Marks has been using DirectSmile in campaign development, and said the build of the software was very simple. Once elements are designed, he went on, everything ties directly into the database at every point. ‘You’re always capturing information and that’s very easy to plug in to. It’s just a case of saying where you want to capture the information from and where you want to send it. It’s very simple and very intuitive.’

At the moment it seems, it is looking like good intuition by both Anton Group and Nutshell Creative.