May 25, 2007
TransPromo in Black and White
Pat McGrew, EDP, Director, Transaction Segment Marketing, Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group; pat.mcgrew@kodak.com
If you have been reading these pages for the last few years, you have seen quite a few words about TransPromo—the technique of using our customers’ buying experiences with us to make targeted offers that are more likely to drive a response and additional revenue. As we’ve talked about TransPromo, we concentrated on how color can be a powerful tool in the TransPromo arsenal, but that doesn’t mean you need color to adopt the power of TransPromo customer communication. You can go a long way down the TransPromo road using great design and great data analysis to generate that higher response.
The most important thing to realize about TransPromo communications is that it’s all about technique and execution. The technique of learning as much as possible about your current customers and the execution of new customer communication designs that enable the use of what you learn so that you can keep those customers longer and derive more revenue from them. It comes down to the three D’s: Data, Design, Delivery. And it doesn’t take spot color or full color to start!
Data
When we talk about data in this context, we mean that range of data concepts that begins with the transaction data that defines our relationship with the customer and ends with data that we can buy or access about our customers that gives us a more rounded picture of who they are, what they buy, and how they spend. If you look at your own credit card statements, insurance bills, or other relationships that cause you to write a check for services rendered, you may start to see that each of those bills provides a single view into who you are and how you live. In fact, you may use certain credit cards for certain types of purchases as a management mechanism for your own budget.
Now look at it from the biller’s point of view. What would a biller know about you from the transactions of one of your department store credit cards or your electric bill? It would be a simplistic view of who you are. This is the challenge of the biller. The first step in developing a closer relationship with customers to ensure customer loyalty requires going beyond the relationship you have today and looking for data about them that allows you to build a more complete picture of who they are.
Once that information is in hand, the next step is to analyze the data to identify demographic segmentations that you can map to services and products these customers do not currently buy from you.
You don’t have anything else these customers might want? Don’t worry. You can still work your way into TransPromo communication. Stand by, we’ll get there next! First find out who has the current transaction data about your existing customers and who in the organization does your market research. These are the stakeholders in growing your wallet share of existing customers.
Design
Now that you have a well-rounded picture of who your customers are, there are two options: make them relevant, timely offers to up-sell or cross-sell to them or use what you know to provide some analysis of their relationship with you or to provide newsworthy information.
Let’s take that second one first. TransPromo can start with education for your customers. Community information added to their statement based on their postal code, tips and ideas based on their spending habits, or a simple reflection of their relationship using graphic elements like pie charts and graphs. TransPromo doesn’t have to start with selling; it can start with education!
But if you have offers to make, this is the time to start making them. In either case your current customer communication will likely require redesign. Good information design techniques are not necessarily in the skill set of your internal forms designers, web designers, or document composition professionals. Information design goes beyond the use of design and document composition tools to encompass how people perceive information and how to serve information to the reader so that they get the most benefit from it. If you are unfamiliar with information design and how it benefits your statement recipients, take a look at any of Edward Tufte’s books (http://www.edwardtufte.com/) or the International Institute of Information Design (http://www.iiid.net/) to learn more about how people acquire information. From these resources you will learn how to build information portals on your customer statements that can start as spots for education and over time grow into marketing portals that that can be used for the cross-sell and upsellNote that we haven’t mentioned color or black at this point. If you have great design and use the design to communicate, color can come later!
Delivery
All of the data analysis and all of the design in the world mean nothing if you don’t actually get the piece into your customer’s hands. That means the design has to be appropriate for mail delivery and it needs to be in a format that the customer recognizes as a business document.
Think again about the bills that your get in your own mailbox. Think about the texture of the paper and the look of the bills. They have a certain feel, and they need that feel to be recognized as bills that require attention. Think about the design. If the marketing portal is overemphasized to the detriment of the business relationship information (what you spent and what you owe), you may not recognize it as a bill, whether it’s in black and white or in color.
When designing for black and white, think about using grayscale images and clean graphics to create designs that grab your customer’s attention, but still look like bills. Make sure that your customer can differentiate the marketing message from the business requirement to pay the bill.
Once again, nothing described here requires color yet it is all TransPromo. Let me know how you are using monochrome communication to keep your customer relationships growing!
About Eastman Kodak Company
Kodak is the world’s foremost imaging innovator. With sales of $10.7 billion in 2006, the company is committed to a digitally oriented growth strategy focused on helping people better use meaningful images and information in their life and work. Consumers use Kodak’s system of digital and traditional products and services to take, print and share their pictures anytime, anywhere; Businesses effectively communicate with customers worldwide using KODAK solutions for prepress, conventional and digital printing and document imaging; and Creative Professionals rely on KODAK technology to uniquely tell their story through moving or still images.
More information about Kodak (NYSE: EK) is available at http://www.kodak.com/