Transforming transactional documents like bills and statements into promotional items is the growing area of Transpromo. Major digital printing press companies have launched activities. Xerox, Kodak, Agfa and others are sending out their "evangelists" to promote this new channel for client communication. Infotrends will be organising the first European transpromo Summit on October 6-7 in Brussels.
Friday I presented to a group of marketers and printers invited by Xerox. Xerox promotes an application that transforms existing invoices and statements to effective and efficient marcom tools. Invoices have our full attention -direct marketers would love to achieve that with their mailings- and consumers spent a couple of minutes checking it each time. However the invoice is "owned by the financial department", not by the marketers. Marketers therefore need to convince financial staff to include marketing messages and to tackle IT hurdles, privacy requirements, customer profile definitions, print production assesments, designer requirements and above all work with all these departments in unison. Xerox recently announced a co-operation with the Belgian Post to evaluate mailings including testing these kind of projects.
New words and acronyms are regularly added to our marketing jargon: individualised offer delivery (IOD) is one of the latest. This term is used to refer to Transpromo; the integration of promotional offers on statements and bills. In the USA, Transpromo is getting a lot of attention from various parties. However it requires a serious investigation of organisational structures, IT structures, costs of accounting and marketing workflows. Because of the impact of Transpromo the US-based Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council has launched an initiative to identify best practices called Precision Promotion: Timely, Targeted and Trackable.
I'm currently involved in a project on Transpromo and experience that this initiative is exactly what is required. This is the first time I read about a marketing organisation investigating and promoting the use a specific marketing communication tool. A truly great initiative.
Introducing Transpromo will not happen on a managers level, it will need full support from the top of that organisation. CMO Council represents global operating companies like AT&T, Google, CSC, Boston Consulting Group and others with a total membership of 3.500 in 52 countries. The Precision Promotion initiative from CMO Council is sponsored by a major supplier - Infoprint Solutions Ricoh | IBM - and plans to present at the CMO Summit in December a report on the results of a 25-point marketing audit.
