InData helps a building materials company
Dave Karras, Marketing Manager at Wimsatt Building Materials, has a great success story about using InData to build a whole range of marketing materials.
As a wholesale distributor of building products, Wimsatt Building Materials delivers roofing, siding, insulation, windows, doors, and composite lumber to builders and contractors across the state of Michigan. With 20,000+ SKUs in over 1500 categories, our Marketing Department had a formidable challenge in communicating building product information to several audiences across multiple media. Our annual printed contractor catalog, our regularly-updated internal price pages, and our online catalog were all isolated production processes that required a great deal of manual effort on the part of the design team and proofreading on the part of our Inventory Department.
To streamline the production process, we set up a database that receives product item data from our inventory system, which we could then supplement with photos, descriptions, and additional product information. Using Em Software’s InData plug-in with Adobe InDesign, we were able to export our product catalog data and merge it with InDesign templates to produce both our full-color contractor-oriented annual catalog and our weekly internal price pages at the push of a button. The new process eliminates data entry errors, extra proofing, and duplication of effort, saving us hundreds of hours of productivity every year.
InData has also enabled us to get creative with custom direct mail. Customers in our Rewards Program receive monthly postcards personalized with their customer information, rewards points balances, and special offers catering to their company’s business. InData seamlessly merges the presorted customer list and marketing data with InDesign templates, creating a unique marketing piece for each customer, sequenced to meet postal discounts.
(Click on any graphic to download a full pdf version. A sample catalog is shown above, and below are a sample price book, and a sample rewards mailing postcard.)
