A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of working with Joe Hornstein and Phil Ashler from UCF on their 2009 Football season ticket renewal campaign.

There were lots of moving parts and pieces to this mail campaign, but effectively combining several elements of personalization, both from an imagery standpoint, as well as text and content, is why this campaign worked so well.

UCF wanted to use the image of a football jersey with the recipient’s name on the back to really make an impact on the recipient right from the start. This created a slight challenge because UCF does not have names on the back of their actual jerseys.

So UCF sent a jersey to us on loan so that we could set up a photo shoot in our studio to set the image and jersey up correctly so that our artists could have what they needed to apply the layer of personalization.

Shooting the jersey in our studio

Once this was complete we started designing the outside of the card itself, which you can see below.

Front of the card w/ personalization

Also notice that the back of the card has a personalized photo with the recipient’s last name spelled out on the field.

Back of card with name on the field

The inside of the card was the actual renewal letter. This element too, was variable, based on what class of ticket holder the person was. All of this personalization is based on “rules” that we set for the program after receiving UCF’s data.

Inside letter

We were able to save UCF the headaches and costs of multiple print runs, because we can include all the different variables and letter versions in the same print run.

After being printed, the cards were placed in our 6 x 9 large window envelope to let the personalization and UCF branding show through and “grab” the recipient. This lets us accomplish the #1 rule of direct marketing: “Get the package opened”. This package would be hard to ignore in your mailbox.

We ink-jetted the recipient’s address as well as the UCF return address on the back of the envelope. In most cases we would actually mail pieces such as this directly from our facility (we have a USPS substation on campus), but instead we boxed and shipped to UCF (in Account ID order, per UCF’s request) so that they could have their ticket office staff stuff other items in the envelope before sending.

All in all, a great looking piece which based on initial feedback seems to be performing exceptionally well for UCF and generating a lot of feedback from their fans, especially as it relates to the “cool” level of personalization.