Transpromo: A new way to communicate with customers

Roger Christiansen provides an introduction to the a business to consumer direct marketing strategy that is growing in popularity - transpromo.

By Roger Christiansen, InfoPrint Solutions

There's one type of communication that you can guarantee people will read: transaction documents like bills, invoices, and statements. Yet too often the opportunity to add marketing messages to this powerful communication is missed. Indeed, according to research carried out by dsicmm, the advertising value of the white space on typical transaction documents is worth over £500m.

This is where Transpromo comes in. Transpromo is a business to consumer direct marketing strategy combining personalised marketing messages with must-read statements, invoices, receipts and other customer-facing documents. Combining transactional print and proactive marketing, firms are hoping that – at a time when direct marketers are under increasing pressure to improve response rates - it may have the potential to generate powerful opportunities worldwide.

By including colour, graphics and customer relationship management (CRM) data, Transpromo provides firms with the ability to influence customer behaviour, increase revenue, extend and deepen customer relationships, and reduce direct marketing costs.

Transactional documents, a recurring form of customer communications, can be powerful direct mail tools because they are opened and read on a regular basis. Instead of plain statements and messages, with Transpromo you can create vivid, personalised, customer-centric communications that will strengthen your brand image and create competitive distinction.

Firms can also improve bill clarity to reduce call centre traffic and include special offers to up-sell, cross-sell, and drive business results. You can also generate revenue by selling advertising space or incorporate personal messaging to build brand loyalty.

Financial institutions, for instance, are beginning to leverage the Transpromo message in order to transform their day-to-day communications. With clever use of their CRM
data and by adopting some basic data-mining techniques, they are able to tailor their communications to be more pertinent and therefore more valuable to their customers.

Getting it right

What's more - by analysing customers' spending patterns and demographics, it's possible to place only relevant offers or promotions in front of the customer. This has two basic effects: Firstly, it gives the customer confidence in the fact the organisation has a more considered and informed approach to their customers. Secondly, due to the pertinent offers, it should significantly increase response rates, therefore justifying the additional cost of implementing a full-colour strategy. So the capital becomes an investment in business growth rather than a cost to the business.

Of course, Transpromo isn't new. The concept has been around for some time, in fact, but practical issues limited its potential. In particular, the print technology for large-scale cost-effective deployment was largely unavailable until recently, and so print production departments had a choice between high-quality, low-speed digital colour devices and low-quality, high-speed ones, with many customers therefore only able to afford Transpromo for small-scale projects.

Although it isn't necessary to deploy Transpromo on high volume transactions – you can use the same technologies to put on invoices, customer letters and even till receipts – this has limited its effectiveness in the past. This is all changing now, however, thanks to the arrival of new cost-effective ways to deliver personalised, colour transaction documents in high volumes.

And the new cost-effective approaches couldn't have arrived at a better time. Direct marketers are not only under pressure to improve response rates at this juncture, but they are also expected to reduce waste. One particular issue is the drive to reduce unpersonalised direct mail, due to lowering response rates and environmental pressure.

Transpromo is about adding marketing messages in to documents that are going out anyway. This means that, with Transpromo, marketers can kill two birds with one stone: reduce wastage (by reducing unpersonalised separate inserts) and improve response rates.

Companies who have already deployed Transpromo include marketing services provider CDMS, which uses Transpromo with Littlewoods, sending out letters with personalised URLs (PURLs). And overseas, Transpromo has already taken off. Spanish direct and promotional marketing company VESA Direct, for example, prints personalised bills and statements for Telefonica Movistar.

So how do you get started?

To implement Transpromo you will need:

• An underlying architecture such as AFP that allows high-speed printing of variable data with complete integrity


• Software tools that enable you to incorporate marketing content onto your transaction documents


• Databases that let you personalise this content to individuals, and store marketing assets such as adverts and logos


• Digital printing technology so that you can output variable data cost-effectively. This can be anything from a laser printer to a production digital printer, depending on print volumes

Roger Christiansen is marketing manager at InfoPrint Solutions.

Click here to download our podcast on 'How to make your marketing messages more effective with TransPromo'.