IBM Ricoh Infoprint delivers remarkable results in Transpromo Pilot Study

If ever there was a story of the value of leveraging client statement activity through Transpromo, the recent story released by Infoprint Solutions company, a joint venture between Ricoh and IBM, and Best Western International might just be one of them.

In a pilot study that was run under the guise of ‘Routes to Revenue’ research initiative from the Chief Marketing Office (CMO) Council, the research set out to highlight opportunity for companies to improve customer engagement, through improving personalisation of documents.

Prior to the pilot, Customers within a segment of Best Western Gold Crown Club International had placed inserts in client quarterly reward card statements.

With around 100,000 Best Western clients within the segment group, Best Western made 50% of this group control and the other 50% were recipient of the new, improved Transpromo statements, replacing the inserts of old.

The nature of the offer was to provide incentive for clients to stay during a set time period and in reward, clients would get free nights, airline miles and gas cards. In addition, Best Western clients were encouraged to apply for a branded credit card.

Now here goes for the good bit.

As a result of the exercise the experience of the group that received the Transpromo statement were really quite impressive -

• The promotion succeeded in improving customer spend and stays.
• The Transpromo group credit card applications were boosted by 500%
• There was a 15% increment in registrations for the rewards scheme.
• One third of the chosen segment went on to stay at a Best Western location after sign up
• The control group also stayed for longer
• ..and generated 30% more in incremental revenue during their stay.

Pretty impressive?

But it is not just the possibilities with Best Western clients that demonstrated the attractiveness of a good, well thought out and segmented Transpromo campaign. The cost savings were pretty impressive to.

“This leading edge pilot demonstrated not only the cost savings of moving from inserts – in this case three plus with each statement – to ‘onserts’, but also has a strong environmental message. Reducing mailings by one quarter is a huge decrease in carbon footprint,” said Lee Gallagher, Manager, Direct Marketing Solutions at InfoPrint. “Added to that, the success of this pilot during one of the most tough economic times for many years, and the benefits of TransPromo are more than clear for any marketer looking to drive value and revenue from existing customer communications.”

Noting that this pilot was also conducted under current economic challenges, I think that what has been achieved here it is pretty impressive and serves to demonstrate that Transpromo is something that should not only be leveraged by Financial Services companies.

The technology used in the Pilot was a combination of GMC Software’s Customer Communications Suite working with the Infoprint 5000 colour printer.

Infoprint have for a long time been an important supplier of Automated Document Factory technology through both their print capability as well as their factory control software such as Infoprint Workflow.

If anybody doubted the potential of Transpromo, I hope that this goes a long way to eroding those doubts. What this pilot illustrates is the value of a good plan, good segmentation, good messaging and a technology infrastructure that can deliver the goods.

ISIS Papyrus at the European Transpromo Summit in October

It is time to mark the calendars again. ISIS Papyrus with its proven expertise in TransPromo messaging will be present as sponsor at the European TransPromo Summit to be held in Brussels on October 6-7 this year. The event, organized by InfoTrends and 4IT Group, will bring together vendors, print service providers, and corporate marketing executives and users for 2 days of information sharing, insight into best practices through real world examples, and peer-to-peer networking. In addition, attendees will be able to meet with industry-leading vendors and service providers during the dedicated technology showcases.

“ISIS Papyrus carries a tradition of excellence in meeting customer requirements based on a unique insight into the customer-to-employee, employee-to-content and content-to-process relationships that are critical to the effectiveness of TransPromo programs,” commented Enrico Barboglio, President of 4IT Group. “Learning how they develop and deliver consolidated customer communications and process optimization solutions for their global expertise in unifying marketing messages and business content for high-impact customer communications enterprise organizations will be a great benefit to conference attendees.”

“ISIS Papyrus software connects enterprises with their customers by producing more financial and telecom documents than any other vendor in the European Union. ISIS Papyrus designed the TransPromo Manager with robust capabilities that leverage transactional processes to enhance customer acquisition, growth and retention for global enterprises,” commented Max J. Pucher, founder and current Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus Software. “As proud sponsors of the European TransPromo Summit, we look forward to sharing real-world solutions for user-guided, personalized promotions that deliver multi-channel customer response, faster campaign cycles and optimal efficiency.”

Welcome to Transpromo World – Effective Marketing through Transactional Statements

Welcome to Transpromo World, a place where you can learn about the technique known as ‘Transpromo’ which is a shortening of the words Transactional and Promotional. Transpromo is the bringing together of promotional or value added activities to traditional customer communication documents such as statements or invoices.

Transaction Document marketing is seen as offering many benefits. Below, a Wikipedia article describes some of the potential benefits of TransPromo.

1. Unrivaled Openability. Statements and invoices are expected—they contain important financial information and usually require action. More than 95% of transaction documents are opened and read each month – far more than any other type of direct response effort.^[1]

2. High Involvement. Bills and statements receive more attention than any other form of communication including television advertisements. Studies show that the average customer invests between one and three minutes for statement review. ^[2]

3. Trusted Media. While e-security and telephone fraud continue to make headlines, nearly everyone trusts the postal service to send and deliver mail – including highly important documents.

4. Functionality. Statements are often viewed more than once. The paper-based nature of transaction mail helps consumers pay bills, submit expense reports, prepare taxes and file documents. ^[3]

5. Greater Returns. Statement-based marketing is effective because it targets current customers. A five percent increase in current customer business can translate into as much as a 50 percent increase in bottom-line profits. ^[4]

6. Customized offers. Statement-based marketing is effective because it is enables customized offers to be automatically generated by the transactional data within the document itself.

On this site, I will be focusing upon the activities of the Transpromo industry and its successes – and some of them are remarkable as well as talking about the implementation of such systems. Hopefully we can help you get to a actionable plan for implementation of Transpromo in your company.

If you are a user of Transpromo or a vendor in the Transpromo industry and have some good case histories that you would like to promote on this site, then please get in touch with us at our main Customer Communications Community Contact Page.