TransPromo: The Ultimate Customer Touchpoint

Barb Pellow, director of Weymouth, Massachusetts-based InfoTrends—a leading market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry—believes leveraging all available customer touchpoints to drive relevant customer interaction is the future of marketing. In the following article, she explained how transPromo documents featuring a promotional message positioned alongside essential transactional information, present a perfect opportunity for achieving both operational and marketing objectives.

Enhanced transactional documents lead to effectively managed cash flow, while reducing postage costs and expenses associated with call centers. Tremendous marketing vehicles, TransPromo documents are also directed toward individuals who have opted into a relationship with your company. These documents can build loyalty and trust, cross-sell, educate, reinforce a brand, and retain and activate clients for the ultimate customer touchpoint.

InfoTrends recently completed its multi-client study entitled Trans Meets Promo… Is It More than Market Hype?. InfoTrends surveyed more than 1,000 consumers, 600 direct marketers and 230 print service providers. Based on feedback, InfoTrends projects the North American market for TransPromo applications printed in full digital color represented 1.7 billion impressions in 2007. By 2012, the number of impressions is expected to reach 22.8 billion. A critical data point in the research was how much time individuals spend reviewing statements and other transactional documents. More than 20 percent of respondents spend more than five minutes reviewing these documents, with all respondents spending an average of two to three minutes reviewing each monthly statement received by mail.

TransPromo users say the level of complexity typically increases with the size and scope of an organization, and while the results are clearly worth it, the campaigns need to be effectively managed. Jon Reske, Vice President of Marketing for UMassFive College Federal Credit Union, noted the key marketing challenge is getting the right message to the right individual. “People in today’s market expect you to know them. We can’t send a promotion for a home equity line of credit to someone who lives in an apartment. UMassFive needs to find the member’s hot button and target appropriately,” he explained.