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Mail Center Management Tips
October 2007
Greetings!

Print/Mail Consultants occasionally distributes thoughts and ideas about topics of interest to professionals in the document production and distribution business. This month, the topic is Transpromo.

If you've been reading the trade magazines, attended any shows, or had any talks with vendors recently, you've probably heard the term TransPromo. TransPromo is the name given to transactional documents that contain marketing information as part of the statement as opposed to delivering the message via a separate envelope insert.

According to InfoTrends, a worldwide market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industries, the biggest opportunity for revenue growth for statement printers is the TransPromo statement.

ISN'T THIS JUST A WAY TO SELL PRINTERS?
 If you have been in the document business for a long time, you might wonder what makes TransPromo different from what we've been doing for the last couple of decades. I know I did.

There are some that may be mildly suspicious that this supposedly new, hot technology is a ploy by the printer manufacturers to sell more boxes. This uncertainty may be caused by the fact that most of the information that first came out was coming from the printer people.

And what about color? It seems that much of the information that is being provided about TransPromo is also oriented towards full color printing. Do we have to invest in color printers to take part in this trend?

There may be some truth in the items that cause this uneasiness. Of course, the printer makers want to sell their product and a key to being successful is identifying a need and then filling it. But in fact, as with many new technologies that have been introduced in this business, it is often the vendors that educate the users and then help them to develop their first applications. In this respect, Transpromo is not that much different from highlight color printing, 2D barcodes, or other technological advancements.

SO WHAT'S NEW ABOUT TRANSPROMO?
 As far as it being new, I think it is and it isn't. Creators of transactional documents have been doing some things that might be considered TransPromo for a long time. Selective inserts, statement stuffers, or variable bill messaging are examples where a customer's past behavior or some other personal factor are used to target a message.

However, today's access to additional data, either within the organization or from external sources, and better tools to correlate the data in order to create a thorough customer profile give statement producers more capability than ever before. Combined with advanced document composition software and production speed printers (color or not), the resulting TransPromo documents can be a powerful marketing and customer relations weapon.

The concept of TransPromo is not revolutionary. But the way we can use the latest technology to add a new dimension of effectiveness to transactional documents is a departure from the past. Instead of it being so much of a numbers game, we can now improve the odds of getting favorable responses by understanding the best way to communicate with each of our customers, having a good idea about what are the most attractive offers to each individual, and how to best deliver that message.

There are of course different degrees of what could be called Transpromo. Different situations will call for different measures. And of course not everyone will have access to all the hardware and software it takes to include full color variable graphics on a statement or bill. But almost everyone has some Transpromo capability that could be developed in their printing and mailing applications with some reasonable expectation of improved results.

We'll probably visit this topic again. In the meantime, feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the material in our newsletters or you want to share some of your own suggestions or opinions.

Sincerely,

Mike Porter Sig
Mike Porter
Print/Mail Consultants
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