Blending the Old With the New

TransPromo has received 
a lot of attention recently as industry pundits highlight the benefits and vendors promote solutions. There are great potential benefits to be gained, but will the current economic conditions slow down or accelerate a move to TransPromo? As a consultant working with many clients on solving both business and technical problems, I regularly think about the current challenges and opportunities in the transactional and the direct mail industry. TransPromo is not a luxury; it's a strategy to help deal with the current economic situation. Now more than ever, mail-based, and indeed all, communications need to become more relevant and cost-effective.

TransPromo has many different definitions. For our purposes, I would like to offer a definition that I believe represents the opportunity. TransPromo communication is the intelligent leveraging of the transactional document to drive customer behavior and create incremental opportunities for business. This can be in the form of education, customer satisfaction enhancements and cross-selling or upselling an existing customer. Effective TransPromo techniques require relevant messaging. TransPromo delivers benefits that create a strategic advantage in today's difficult economic environment.

TransPromo can reduce marketing waste. Every organization is interested in improving performance and most have adopted continuous improvement processes and tools. Mail already is measurably more effective than print and broadcast media; however, there are still big potential gains to be made.

Transactional documents are mailed to current customers, who represent an opportunity to not only increase revenue but to also significantly increase margin. With an openability rate exceeding 95 percent, transactional mail trumps personalized, unsolicited direct mail which has, on average, a 48 percent openability rate, according to InfoTrends. For existing customers, transactional mail is more efficient from a marketing perspective. In addition, because true TransPromo embeds messages within the statement, generic inserts (which are easily discarded from transactional documents at the household) are no longer necessary.