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.

Harry Stephens CEO of DATAMATX, author of “Harry’s corner” on E-DocumentNews.com has a great summary of Telestrategies Billing Conference in Orlando. This covers the correlation between postal rate increases and e-billing adoption rates. Neither the sender or the payer likes to shell out extra money for postage.

Also, it covers the continuing rise of the full color transactional document. He mentions, “The conversion to color is being driven by the ability to incorporate personalized messages into statements coupled with the availability of high-speed variable digital color printing technology.

 If you missed the conference, like I did, this is a great summary of the key points of interest.

During a family vacation to Orlando, I saw that Disney had a great end to end transpromotional strategy. Nearly every transaction had a promotional upsell or tip. This isn’t unusual in itself, but they did it immediately and their employees delivered the pitches personally in an unobtrusive manner.

 I bought tickets online, and received a confirmation offering a deal on an extra day. When I redeemed them at the park, the cashier offerred me another upgrade promotion.  The online transaction was completed with a human delivered promotion that was tied into the ticket redemption system.

Once we got into the various parks, the reciepts had promotional messages and invitations to websites. Nearly every non-food transaction was accompanied by a reminder to attend the park’s daily parade, including suggestions for the best viewing spots. Although not a promotion (in the up-sell sense), it invited customers to get more out of the service they already purchased.

Once I returned, I checked out their photopass website, which stored the photos they took (my daughter with the characters), and they had various upsells and cross-sells on the site. The offers included 20% off if I bought a few more photos, or a photo CD.

I’m sure that’s not the last I’ll hear from the Disney people, as they probably have more info on me than the IRS does. But this was a great example of a highly evolved holistic transpromotional strategy. From online orders, reciepts, human messengers, and delivery invoices, almost every transaction is followed immediately by a promotion. And it worked pretty well.