formerly transpromotional.com

Chris Stone (CEO of SteamServe Inc)’s article, “Transforming Account Statements Into A Sophisticated Marketing Tool

Making ‘Amount Due’ Work for You” covers Transpromotional documents from the angles of EDP (Enterprise Document Presentment) software.

The value of the article lies in the variety of perspectives covered. The EDP strategy is covered through the lenses of sales, marketing, finance, IT and communication.

The article refers to the statement as a “place” for customer interaction. The financial benefits described include bottom-line profit from reducing the amount of direct mail being sent out and top line revenue from additional sales to existing customers.

Chris also coversthe EDP concepts from a variety of other perspectives in a quick fire manner. There’s something for everyone in the article, and I recommend it as a valuable read.

Pat McGrew’s TransPromo Customer Communication: It Comes in Many Flavors from December 2006 on Outputlinks.com does a great job covering the range of transpromotional options, separating the glitzy parts from the regular parts of a transpromotional document. As usual, the document gets all of the credit, but teamwork at the firms makes it happen.

 She points out that you can add things in the order that makes sense to your company:

• Put some promotional messages on your monochrome statement
• Remove irrelevant information from the statement with variable data
• Add some brand imaging
• Build your data mining capabilities then
• Add lifestyle targeted imaging
• Incorporate recipient specific design elements
• Keep improving the format and design

The message is do what you can when you can. Don’t get in over your head, and realize that everyone is learning at this time. You can have an industry leading application before you know it.

Just remember, this is relatively new, so you can be an expert in a very short period of time. All you need is creativity and a knack for smashing interdepartmental IT and communication barriers.

If you want to see a good transpromotional application in action, check out the “How to read your statement” page from Time Warner Cable. Check out their site, and you can scroll over their sample bill to see a description.

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I enjoy seeing transpromotional documents in my mail. Chase Auto Finance recently upgraded their monthly statement mailing to me. Although a step in the right direction, they wasted a lot of effort for what they produced. Here it is:

This looks like something from when I started in 1997, not something from 2007.  Read the rest of this entry »