Case Study: Regional Department Store Chain achieves scaled personalization and $800K–$2.3M in savings with Quad

Using Data to Scale Personalization and Cut Costs

Regional Department Store Chain, a long‑established retailer with hundreds of southern U.S. locations, wanted to scale personalized circular direct mail to focus on loyal customers who hold its tiered store credit cards while also cutting costs. The marketing team engaged Quad to assess whether segmentation and personalization could be funded by savings in production and postage without harming sales from reduced non-loyal customer mailings.

Quad optimized the retailer’s circular program end‑to‑end: testing mail piece rigidity and presort strategies to meet USPS requirements, switching to lower‑cost but qualified paper, moving production from web offset to gravure and using saddle‑stitch demo capabilities to segment content while maintaining a single mail stream. Quad also recommended loyalty‑tier and behavior‑based personalization and a three‑phase “crawl, walk, run” rollout; projected paper, manufacturing and postage savings ranged from $800K to $2.3M and allowed increased counts on non‑automated mail and reinvestment in targeted marketing.