The Mission for Print (and Social Media, e-Mail, Inbound Marketing, Mobile): Get the Buyer to Buy

By Scott Gerschwer

There are more ways to miss out on sales opportunities than there are grains of sand on a beach.

One of the best ways is to overlook an opportunity.

I sense that transpromo—print in general, but transpromo more specifically—is being overlooked more often than not these days by companies caught up in the value of various online opportunities, including display, SEM/SEO, social networking and other kinds of inbound marketing.

All the advisory groups can now point to analytics that show how organizations get better results with online channels. Analytics have gone from under used to over used in a breathtakingly short period of time. Marketing analytics define audience attributes and behavior, which inform the targeting of messages. Analytics tell us which of our marketing campaigns and channels realize the best ROI. Analytics tell us how our various tactics identify and nurture opportunities from leads to sales. Analytics optimize search.

Don’t get me wrong: I like analytics. I like having metrics available to measure the success or failure of a marketing strategy and the associated tactics and campaigns. Hey, I’m a baseball fan: Numbers are everything. But, as with baseball analytics, marketing analytics can sometimes measure the wrong thing and distract us from what really matters: bottom line results. We need a Bill James to come in and define sabremetrics for marketers. 

Many of the online channels are great, especially those that give the customer a voice and allow the customer to provide us with testimonials and word of mouth that mean so much more than our say-so. But nothing stirs this technology stew better than print does. And transpromo can really get things started in a way that strengthens all these other channels.

Yet print is getting nudged out of the mix and transpromo isn’t as popular as many of us think it should be. And why is that? Part of the answer is technosis—which I’ll define as a tendency to love the technology more than the result. CRM was once the victim of technosis, where people bought the databases and software before they had defined a role for them to play. The result was databases on top of databases and messy expensive technology that did not deliver the promised value. That was an example of technosis.

With that in mind, when I think of the current situation, vis-à-vis transpromo and the print/mail channel, I think of two things:

1) Analytics are skewed toward the closers, not the starters and not the middlemen, not even the heavy-lifters or the run blockers (to change the sports metaphor in mid-stream). This means that more attention is paid to the last step in the process without regard for how it got started. To get back to the baseball metaphor, if you can’t get on base you can’t score a run. and it doesn’t matter how you got on base whether it’s a walk, hit or error.

2) Marketers in the transactional mail space aren’t using the best available copywriting resources to provide the transpromo copy with the necessary punch. If anything, transactional documents are being treated with too much finesse, as if they would collapse under the weight of a direct mail-type message. In fact, transactional documents are the pack mules of the message business, able to withstand even greater burdens than a direct mail piece because they are so widely read and scrutinized.    

Let’s look first at analytics. Many organizations have different marketers working the same campaign on different channels. One team may be developing white papers, Webinars and press releases. Another team has road-tested various display ads and has placed them online. Another team is in charge of key words. Another does e-mail blasts.

And they each have their own analytical tools. At the end of the week each of them claims credit for closing X dollars in sales. Each demands more budget for the next campaign. But when you add up the sales, they equal 3X revenue. What went wrong?

It’s a simple sales/marketing reconciliation challenge. It used to be resolved by executive fiat but can now be resolved by putting all campaigns on a single analytics platform and measuring them all equally by their marketing objective.

Here’s where the problem lies for transpromo: The marketing objective for transpromo may be to get a conversation started with an existing customer (transpromo is not going to get you new customers unless you manage to attach some kind of viral campaign to the Purl to spread it to newbies). That conversation may continue online—in fact it probably should continue online because you have more control of it there. Maybe there is even a latency period between when it went online and when it closed—there often is, it depends on factors beyond our control like the prospects bank account or personal bandwidth.

There’s no reason to believe that just because it closed online that there is no need for the print piece. The print piece helped create a necessary condition for a sale: the buyer read about it there first. Perhaps more detail was needed and that detail could be found online in the form of testimonials or product specs. It may not have been sufficient for a sale but it was necessary. There’s value in initiating the process that led to the sale. It should also make the cut for remarketing and keeping the conversation going—the old saw about the bill being a monthly appointment—because it will lead to more sales (if you use the message space correctly).

Too often the value of the print channel is over ridden by the online channel that closed the deal. The strength of the opening is forgotten about in all the excitement of the endgame. And that is a missed opportunity.   

As for the second part, transpromo is still being treated like a first child: Many practitioners are being too careful with it. Think of it as a middle child or a youngest child and you’ll be better off.

When I was in grad school at NYU, I had a professor that claimed that our job as writers was to “improve on the blank page.” After seeing the snickering smiles on the faces of his students, he sternly admonished us that it was not as easy as you think. And he was right.

Something Roger Gimbel said in an interview recently made me think of that. He said that printers needed to use the white space more effectively. Transpromo, Roger stated, was a way to use the available space on a bill or statement for variable messaging. And he was right.

The job of printers these days is to get buyers to buy by improving on the blank page. Because whatever else you want to call the various permutations—trans-info, trans-education— at the bottom line, leveraging the trans-document is about branding and marketing and turning prospects into buyers. If you really want to use transpromo correctly, says column reader Michael Lambert, use it to publish your customer service FAQs. This can be done easily with Sefas Innovation’s Remake product, which is certainly worth looking into.

Thomas Wetjen, president of Graphics Communication World, a publication in the OutputLinks family, looks at the future of print with all-too-rare optimism. His reason: Print is about results.

It’s not about process, it’s not about substrates, it’s not about speed or color or VDP—it’s about getting results. And as long as print gets solid results and delivers a solid return on the investment it will continue to be a viable, profitable channel. Print has the power to convert prospects into buyers.

If your transpromo effort is not quite off the ground yet, consider taking a harder approach to having it deliver results. Don’t be shy. You have a vehicle that’s going to be read. Take a page from the direct mail marketing world and make a great offer. Be creative. Be affirmative. Keep the copy simple to read and direct. But don’t fail to ask for action. Don’t fail to finish the pitch by asking for their business. You won’t offend anyone if you’ve done your homework, segmented your customer base and done your analytics.

If you have a transpromo effort in the works but you aren’t sure if you are getting the results you want, hire a good copywriter. Be proactive. Make the offer something that is consistent with the promise of your brand but does not beat around the bush.

If you can provide a Purl or even a unique 800, you’ll be able to track the lead as it moves toward close. If another channel closes the deal, great. But don’t forget who got the rally started.

Print is a great media for getting results. I talked to a firm yesterday that got $50K from one mention of a new product in an existing mailing. They asked me to expand what was essentially a throw-away line into an integrated pitch. To do this I’m not using my softer marketing skills. I’m copywriting the heck out of it. I’m using all the tools and key words and button-pressers. I’m improving on the blank page.

Print: It’s where the buyers are.