The transpromo opportunity is being viewed through a telescope: the printers and equipment suppliers have hold of the small end and are looking at an object that is tantalisingly close; the customers have hold of the large end and see a great distance between them and the object they are looking at. In between are all sorts of problems and bridging that gap is going to be a steady process.
James Shand, whose experience of digital printing goes back 30 or more years and has been in at the birth of transpromo, describes the wave effect where nothing happens in document design then a tidal wave of change sweeps over the industry. The transpromo tsunami is around the corner. He was joined in a Print Business table by Kate Rowland, M&G, Allen Thrasher, from InfoPrint Solutions and Roger Christiansen also of InfoPrint Solutions. These days Shand has a consultancy business with two colleagues to help finance, retail and utilities companies understand and exploit the potential of transpromo. In earlier times he had run Edotech one of the first digital printing service bureaus where he implemented an early transpromo piece. The back of the wages slip received by all employees of a local council was printed with a promotional offer from a fast food chain. The offer worked on all levels: staff received a discounted meal; the restaurant saw more business and the council managed to offset the cost of printing the wage slips. Needless to say something changed and the opportunity has been lost.
However, it provided a concrete example of how transpromo might work when there are relatively few case studies to call upon. The transpromo document is generally perceived as a sales opportunity, but those around the table cautioned against both this interpretation and the sales potential. Allen Thrasher, who before joining Info Print Solutions last year had been consulting in this area where marketing and technology overlap, pointed out that it can include any type of interaction and communication with a customer. Kate Rowland agreed: “Some of that communication is a legal requirement for us. But it does provide an opportunity to consider can you say anything else.”
In M&G’s case the answer was yes as the opportunity to produce a transpromo piece came when the investment company merged different products. Some years earlier she had seen what could be done with personalised data and printing at dsicmm without being able to justify it. Now here was the opportunity to take advantage by presenting each investor with a personalised mailing, comprising the report on the performance of their investment portfolio, neatly presented using personalisation and colour to deliver a more informative printed report than had been produced before. Part of the success, she said, came from the tight deadline M&G was working to which brought the team together and helped them focus on the new product rather than any differences in opinion.
Brand Support
The benefits came from appreciative customers and fewer disgruntled callers to the support desk. There was also an opportunity to underline the M&G brand and to promote other products, but, given this was about financial information, the opportunity had to be handled with care. All sorts of regulation restrict what can be said by law, something that Rowland found comforting. “What you mustn’t do is be too sales led, it is a very, very fine line. But this type of communication doesn’t always have to be about a sales opportunity, it can be about brand building,” she added.
Thrasher pointed out that a recently published Forrester report shows that consumers find cross selling acceptable, but not promotional messages from third parties. That might change as consumers become accustomed to the changing face of their statements and they become comfortable with the messaging they include.
Before that happens there are many obstacles to overcome. “Stakeholders can be very nervous about transpromo,” said Shand. “Finance, operations and legal all have an interest as well as marketing in any change and you need to have them all in the same room to get agreement. Marketing is starting to get it now and drive it where before it was operations that was in charge of transactional documents.” If the switch leads to savings at the call centre, there is a reduction in the area that operations controls.
'There is a big impact on customer satisfaction and on the traffic received at the call centre,” Thrasher agreed, “because the communication is able to address some of the issues that would be raised at the call centre. Your customers are more understanding of how your company can work with you.”
But if some marketing departments are starting to understand the potential that transpromo offers, others are lagging. “There’s still a group of people that aren’t very well aware of what can be done at all,” she explained. “One of the things we come across is the company that has a limited, preconceived viewpoint, thinking that what can be done is limited to two or three lines on a statement and explaining ‘my IT people will not let me use more than that’ or that they don’t have the data or cannot access it. Then they have to get the IT people on board.” Consequently setting up a transpromo initiative can be a struggle without support from the highest levels of an organisation.
Testing
The classic way to introduce a transpromo communication is through a test campaign, examination of the results to justify it, tweaking it in response to feedback and then rolling it out to the next level. Rowland might have liked to have done this at M&G, but the circumstance she was under meant she had to run the test across the whole of the customer base. There have, however, been adjustments as a result of customer feedback and she is continuing to push for further changes. “It can be difficult to make a change once you have proved that it can work, but you have to keep the product fresh while keeping the stakeholders on board. I believe that you should never stand still,” she explained.
Getting the go ahead in the first place can be a drawn out process to convince an organisation that changing the statement for a potentially more expensive document will be worthwhile. Shand said he worked on a retail client for a year before the retailer was convinced enough to go ahead. It was a case of showing how a redesign of the statement would be better at encouraging holders of the loyalty card to come into the store by targeting offers to match the customer profile, rather than inserting a generic leaflet with every mailing. The example proves another point. “It’s not just for the big boys. This is a retailer with fewer than 20,000 card holders and the mailing is going to only a portion of that data base,” he explained.
His company is working on another example for an insurance company while Thrasher demonstrated a US example of how a hotel chain had made different offers to customers depending on the level of their spend. A Spanish telecoms company had a campaign where of 400 messages, 200 could be precisely tailored. In short there is no ‘boiler plate’ answer to what a transpromo piece looks like across all
market types.
But there was agreement that the opportunity to maintain a consistent message across all media types, whether on paper or online is key. There is no reason to doubt the quality of printed output any longer, nor therefore any reason why a customer should be satisfied with a poorly printed, black-only line print out of a statement or worse, a computer spread sheet of investment performance, when the upfront
marketing literature is produced to the highest quality, adhering to house colours and fonts. Roger Christiansen added: “You have to look at transpromo as part of the overall customer experience and when you do that it becomes obvious that you should use transpromo.”
Print and online
However, online has been the channel that many larger corporations, banks especially have encouraged. It seems that this might be a mistake. The Forrester research chimes with earlier reports that indicate a greater preference among consumers, even among the younger age groups, for printed statements which can be stored safely and referred to when necessary. There is another drawback to the online-first strategy as Thrasher pointed out in that people no longer enter a bank branch and therefore no longer see the point of presence messaging that is used. “They have encouraged customers to bank online and they risk losing contact with their customers,” she said. “Further, people trust paper, they want to hold it and in the messaging, they want you to be respectful of them.”
That pushes the design aspect of the statement and transpromo piece to the fore. The data management and output channel are easy to manage, the analytics are straightforward, it is the design that takes the time said Thrasher. It needs to hold to the branding, needs to be consistent with the message and be aware of the needs of different audiences. This will increasingly include the call centres where the need to bring up an electronic version of the mailed document to verify what messaging has been sent to that customer will become an issue. But that moves the argument into the greater issue of document management and life cycle and is a different, though interrelated, subject.
Transpromo is about improved communications with the customer, strengthening the value placed upon the client and the development of a deeper relationship. It is a communications channel, which is perhaps why Rowland, in charge of customer communications rather than purely marketing, has helped M&G achieve the results it has. Speaking for all those who share her responsibilities, she said: “Transpromo is one of the tools in my tool box.”
The panellists
Allen Thrasher is direct marketing principal for Ricoh Infoprint across the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region. Her role is to drive the company’s relationships with marketing people, particularly in the transpromo area. Her background includes New York advertising, 20 years in marketing and IT. She has been based in the UK for seven years and says the aim is “to raise awareness of transpromo”.
James Shand is director of a consultancy business called Tripartum with document design specialist Ben Whitmore and IT expert Mike Prager. He has a long history in digital transactional printing having led Edotech as one of the foremost outsourcing bureaus of its time working for the likes of Barclays Bank, BT and MBNA. He was trying to promote the use of transpromo at Edotech six years ago, but says the UK wasn’t interested at that time. That is now changing with Tripartum positioned to offer a complete range of services to companies wanting to become involved with “transpromo, transeducation, transinformation – transwhatever”.
Kate Rowland is responsible for communications to a consumer audience for asset management company M&G.
She is a user of transpromo having launched a product in 2008 using the skills of Ben Whitmore and dsicmm. Transpromo was the answer to the question of “how could we use personalised communication in a cost effective way to reach our client base. We had an idea what we wanted, but didn’t know if it was possible”. She has been in the UK for 22 years working in academic publishing and financial services.
Roger Christiansen is UK marketing manager for InfoPrint Solutions. This is the joint venture between Ricoh and IBM which in June next year becomes a direct subsidiary of Ricoh. The role is to provide complete solutions involving software and document management, independently of output engines at times. He spent 10 years with IBM, developing its web based e-learning projects.