Transpromo – a missed opportunity!

Guy Buswell, CEO of UK Mail Group, discusses Transpromo for Post&Parcel. Transpromo combines printed transactional and promotional content to better reach customers by utilising routine and planned communications. Put simply, marketing material is placed on scheduled transactional documents such as statements, invoices, confirmations and bills to promote offers and services. This may sound straightforward enough, but many companies are missing an opportunity by not adopting such an approach.

There are many advantages of a Transpromo solution that can make it a valued part of any direct marketing strategy. For example, most transactional documents are opened and read each month, with view levels as high as 95% according to some research, so a company is all but guaranteed to reach its existing customer base.

Bills and statements require greater involvement than other forms of communication as they often contain financial information that needs to been reviewed and require some form of action. In addition, these documents tend to be filed and viewed more than once – helping the recipient pay bills, submit expense claims, prepare tax returns – providing multiple chances to communicate marketing messages.

This kind of direct marketing also provides the added benefit of allowing companies to customise communications to target specific customer groups. By adapting messages and offers, documents can be personalised based on transactional data, buying habits and other customer data, so the right information is communicated at the right time.

So why aren’t more businesses buying into Transpromo? The disjointed nature of many larger organisations is one major barrier. The responsibility of transactional and direct marketing mailings will be spread across different teams, which have little history or experience of working together on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, there is a need for operations and marketing departments to work together to develop a joined up approach that creates a mutually beneficial, integrated opportunity.

There is also a perceived added cost associated with Transpromo. Traditionally, bills and statements use black print on pre-printed paper to keep overheads to a minimum. In contrast, statement-based marketing requires eye-catching design and colour to deliver a mix of functional, transactional data and bold promotional messages.

Meanwhile, the tailoring the marketing communications to better target individual customers requires smaller print runs adding a premium to the print costs. Furthermore, investment may also be needed to IT infrastructure to handle the added database and mail merge requirements of this customisation.

What is important to bear in mind is that whilst Transpromo mailings may be more expensive to organise and print, the overall cost to a business may in fact reduce. By sharing overheads across a number of budgets, including operations and marketing, this type of activity could actually drive down costs. The combination of transactional and promotional mailings could create efficiencies by removing spend from elsewhere in the business that will outweigh any additional printing costs.

In recent years, some companies have begun to switch to e-statements, resulting in some decline in mail-based transactional documents. However, online documentation tends not to generate the same viewing levels as physical mail, so by making this change, companies are stopping the only direct marketing tool guaranteed to be opened and read.

The postal service remains a trusted means to send and deliver information, including highly important documents, which cannot always be said for other communication mediums. For example, the rise in online and telephone fraud has created a level of mistrust amongst many people, so there will be a place for Transpromo opportunities for years to come.

Transpromo may require a different approach to sending mail, but the potential benefits far outweigh any investment needed in terms of time and money. Just a five percent increase in current customer business is proven to translate into as much as a 50% increase in bottom line profits. Statement-based marketing offers one of the most effective ways of targeting an existing customer base, so companies are missing a massive opportunity to increase sales and drive business growth.