Transpromotional printing (or “transpromo” to those in the know) is a growing market for digital printing. But just how much of it can go to your in-plant?

By Mark Smith

TRANSPROMO, ADDING marketing messages to bills/statements, is a rarity in today’s business climate—a printing segment that promises strong growth. Unfortunately, that spending is likely to come out of a company’s traditional direct mail budget.

According to research done by InfoTrends, a Questex Co., color digital output of transpromo work totaled more than 1.6 billion pieces in 2006. InfoTrends projects the annual output to approach 22 billion pieces by 2010, for a 91 percent compound annual growth rate.

Several factors contribute to the bullish outlook for this market segment.

1|Bills and statements enjoy nearly 100 percent delivery and open rates, and consumers are interested in the contents, making this a desirable target audience.

2|The majority of consumers have yet to embrace online billing and payment, so companies have to do these mailings. That makes them very motivated to offset the cost.

3|Recent changes instituted a very favorable postal rate for sending a second ounce at the First Class rate. This makes it very cost effective to increase the size of bill/statement mailings to accommodate marketing messages.

Although not yet a driving factor, there’s also the specter of proposed “do not mail” legislation.

Working against these positives is the ingrained corporate mind-set of being extremely aggressive on the cost of such documents. As a consequence, the per-page cost of full-color output can send potential users into sticker shock. They must be convinced that the conversion will have an ROI, which typically involves a long sell cycle.

Providing a turnkey solution is one method some service providers have implemented to overcome this resistance. In essence, they give customers favorable cost terms for production of the documents in exchange for the rights to sell marketing messages in the available white space.

For the most part, printing system vendors believe the same devices will be suitable for both graphic arts and transpromo printing applications. Variable data software plays a role, but the work is chiefly prepared in specialty applications from firms such as GMC Software Technology, Exstream Software and others.

TP Summit Draws a Crowd

InfoTrends recently put on a TransPromo Summit in New York City that drew several hundred attendees. The current and potential users and service providers in attendance included in-plant managers from Allstate and Portland General Electric. Taken as a whole, the sessions served as a good primer on the business and production issues companies face in capitalizing on this opportunity.

Several success factors kept being raised by speakers regardless of the topic specified for the given session. Among these: Messages must be relevant and channel agnostic; having a good database is critical; pieces must be well designed for the purpose (marketing); and customer education is still required.

In addition, several speakers cautioned that development efforts don’t end when the first piece is mailed. Messaging must be refreshed on a regular basis and should be adjusted to reflect any response to date from a recipient.

Broader use of color is one element that defines transpromo vs. traditional statements, but it’s not an absolute requirement. Spot color and black-and-white components may be sufficient.

The choice of production vehicle can have design considerations, such as aqueous ink-jet printing not supporting the same amount of color coverage as toner. It’s not a case of simply doing the existing piece in color, since design changes may be warranted to keep costs down. An alternative way of thinking about transpromo color is to break it down into three levels—full, anywhere and select, in declining order of cost.

Expertise in information design, production technology, results measurement techniques and postal optimization is required to craft an effective program.

As a data center and transactional segment evangelist at Eastman Kodak, Pat McGrew is an advocate at large for the transpromo market segment, and not just for Kodak’s efforts. She points out that the traditional statement was never actually designed in the true sense.

“People just used as many characters as they could make fit on a line. They focused on jamming data onto a piece of paper,” McGrew explains.

The redesign process for converting a traditional statement into a transpromo piece can take six weeks to six months, depending on the condition of the current statement, approval process involved and output device used, says the evangelist. Other speakers at the TransPromo Summit see the implementation timeline ranging from six months to two years, not including the sell cycle.

McGrew agrees with reallocating some marketing dollars to a transpromo program, but advises against completely turning off direct mail campaigns.

“Companies should leverage the benefits of each (medium) and do less, but more effective, direct mail,” she says.

Bringing the discussion full circle, Nick Romano, president of the Prinova consulting firm, says its important to keep the purpose of these documents paramount when planning and executing a transpromo program.

“Getting the customer to pay the bill is still the main objective,” he observes.IPG