i-docs

Transpromo describes a type of document or corporate communication strategy that delivers transactional information and promotional marketing messages. By adding relevant messages to transaction documents, companies can strengthen relationships and increase revenue.

Transpromotional documents combine CRM Customer relationship management and data analysis technology together with variable data printing in full color. This powerful combination reduces the cost of traditional statement printing by sharing the print spend with a marketing spend while reaching the prospect base of all existing customers.
Today's printing technology allows companies to deliver more effective transpromotional documents than ever before, as full color variable data printing and variable data document composition software can be fully integrated into Collections and CRM systems to match existing customers with offers that are most likely to trigger a response. Evenmore, valuable information collected at provisioning phase can now be used for offering extra value to your customers. i-docs enables you to create and produce truly personalized communications, with no limit as to what content can be variable from piece to piece.

The transpromo concept isn’t new; it was originally introduced to the market at the XPlor conference and Exhibition in Dallas in 1996. Certainly by 2003 the systems themselves were very refined, reliable and affordable.

Transpromo ingredients
In order to get benefit of transpromotional documents you will need the followng ingredients:

• i-docs document composition engine that enables you to incorporate marketing content onto your transactional documents
• i-docs web personalizer that will permit you to fully introduce your marketing campaigns and combine them with the transactional document
• Databases with customer related data such as age, town, profile that let you personalise this content to individuals
• i-docs archiver that will be needed for archiving the personalized document. Archiving is a diffiult task due to volumes and the size of the document to be saved. Having wrote that, retrieval of the personalized document, keeping the original format is necessary to cover legal reprints requirements.  Storing the image of the personalized document seems to be very expensive and resource demanding.
• A Digital Printing infrastructure (in-house or outsourced) 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

What the market says about Transpromo?
"Since 95 percent of transaction documents are opened and read, they provide an excellent vehicle for reaching customers with other types of messages and information," states Barbara Pellow, group leader, InfoTrends, Inc. "Studies have shown that on average, a consumer will spend one to three minutes reviewing a bill - that is how much time the marketer has to capture the recipient’s attention when using the transactional document as a marketing vehicle."

"While typical recipients spend some- where around 15 seconds looking at an insert, they spend nearly three times that time with TransPromo documents. And while recipients tend to discard inserts, most save statements and other transactional documents," adds Guy Broadhurst, VP of Product Marketing, Oce North America, Production Printing Systems.

Environmental responsibility
Many industries are pushing for reduced environmental impact. TransPromo places marketing materials that may have traveled in a separate mailer in the past right onto a transactional document. "It's all about making smarter print material - that’s the core of TransPromo - sending the customer something that is completely relevant to them," says Pat McGrew, data center and transaction segment evangelist, Kodak Graphic Communications Group

Step-by-step approach
Although it isn't necessary to deploy Transpromo on high volume transactions - you can use the same technologies to put on bills or statements, customer letters and even till receipts -this has limited its effectiveness in the past.
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. Utilization of Transpromo could be delivered in parallel with inserts and separated mails. If you are about to redesign your documents then you need to train your customers about it.