Transpromo Opportunities: Going Beyond the Monthly Statement 

There are transactional documents, and there are documents that represent a transaction. The former is the document that gets all the hype, such as the traditional billing statement that arrives each month from your bank, wireless provider, or credit card company. The second category, equally useful in cross-selling and building customer loyalty, includes individual or small-batch documents such as late-fee letters, overdraft notices, and confirmation letters. Some of these are not the most popular envelopes in the mailbox. Nevertheless, these documents can be a way to connect with the customer in a positive way even while they deliver what may be an unpopular message.  In both cases,

-            The mailing gets opened

-            The customer needs the information

-            The mailing represents an opportunity to either cross-sell/up-sell or build customer loyalty, depending on the content

Sending a bank notice that a customer’s account is overdrawn is an opportunity to up-sell overdraft services. If you’re in marketing and reading this, then consider sweetening the offer a bit and waiving a portion of the overdraft fee if the customer opts to add the overdraft protection. This could significantly boost the number of people who sign up and also build customer loyalty by causing the customer to associate the fee with adding a service rather than making a math error.

Production volume is the biggest difference between the two document types. Statements are printed in bulk, and letters and notices are printed in smaller quantities either on non-production printers or batched and sent to volume printers.

Regardless of how the letters and notices get printed, they often take a different path for document composition and one that does not lend itself well toward highly customized content relevant to the customer and the occasion.

Traditional letter-writing applications and word processing software do not offer the key benefits of variable-data documents, namely:

-          integration of sophisticated business rules driving the document content

-          control on a section-by-section basis as to who can edit the document

-          organized approval routing

-          web-based business user interface (rather than programmer-level coding)

On the other end of the spectrum, there are many document composition systems that can provide all the robust content handling and production but are suited toward programmers and developers.

Today’s document correspondence applications such as the Elixir Correspondence System offer the best of both worlds.

Easy-to-use web-based word processing interfaces can be accessed from any browser and are suited to all business users in the organization. Any area of the document can be protected from editing or, conversely, can allow editing. The foundation for each document is based on a template which can contain any number of business rules to drive the content, determine who can edit, who can approve it, and more.

Visit the Elixir web site to learn more, or watch one of these Flash presentations.

Print Service Bureau – creates bank letters and notices > click to view

Healthcare Provider – develops ID cards > click to view

For information on

Elixir print and web solutions

visit www.elixir.com