TransPromo can be a good idea when you have the motive, means and opportunity!

By Pat McGrew, EDP, Kodak

Last month the conversation revolved around when embarking on a TransPromo course might be a bad idea. I heard from many readers who had examples of TransPromo projects gone awry. The five points identified as reasons why a TransPromo project might fail resonated. That doesn’t mean that every project that has an eye on a set of transaction communications and an idea of how to integrate some marketing messaging into those communications is a bad project. In practice, many companies have taken tools from the TransPromo toolkit and used them to add revenue to their bottom line, reduce call center costs and improve customer experience. You can do it, too!

Let’s start with the basics. There is no single correct implementation of a TransPromo communication project. There are many varieties of customer-facing communications that might take on marketing elements, including business-to-business communication and even small business invoicing. Whether you send bills to hundreds of thousands of customers or only 20 or 30 customers, there are tools in the TransPromo toolkit that can work for you. The only things you must have are a transaction document that you regularly (monthly, quarterly) send to a recipient, some information about the recipient (it can be any data point that is relevant to your business) and something more you want to market to them. TransPromo is, after all, a method of adding promotional content to a transaction document.

If you have these three things, your next step is to see if you can get over the hurdles identified last month. TransPromo is a good idea when:

1. …you have buy-in from C-suite management.
   WHY? As noted last month, resources from every department will be needed. In most organizations, unless the executive leadership has mandated cooperation, it’s hard to get. If the executive leadership gets the word out to their team and ensures that the message is carried to the teams, no hurdle is too high.
2. …you have identified what constitutes a successful TransPromo program for your organization.
   WHY? No two companies will take the same path to a TransPromo solution because every company has different needs, drivers, and business models. Remember, TransPromo is not a package you buy, pour out of a box and wait for success. TransPromo is a combination of people and processes combined with a document strategy (See Kevin Craine’s book, Designing a Document Strategy, if you need help defining one). As long as you can define your goals and articulate your expectations, TransPromo may be for you.
3. …you know the return rates on your current marketing programs.
   WHY? TransPromo is all about measuring success, tracking response rates, and metering the return on the marketing investment using the transaction channel. Knowing your current response rates, investments, customer churn rates and program expectations will be essential to understanding if your TransPromo program has been a success. You’ll want to run a pilot and measure the results to know if your TransPromo vision actually works as planned.
4. …you have your customers segmented into relevance buckets.
   WHY? We know that mining data is always a good idea, but what you do after you mine the data is almost more important. It’s not just age, gender and physical address, but psychographic data, spending patterns and repayment patterns that will help you identify which customers you should be targeting and which you should be firing.
5. …your marketing department is ready to create monthly campaigns for multiple segments.
   WHY? TransPromo is a study in expanding the conversations you have with customers. More messages. More segments. More discrete approaches to more well-defined groups. It will take some work to look at what you know about the customers and some brainstorming to identify marketing campaigns that make sense for the segments you want to target. You’ll need ways to track response and the ability to change the messaging if it isn’t working. You’ll be creating dozens of campaigns instead of four or six. It’s a commitment!

Have some favorites of your own? Let me know!

Pat McGrew, EDP, is the data-driven communication evangelist at Kodak. Her email address is Pat.McGrew@kodak.com, Twitter is PatMcGrew, and blog at http://patmcgrew.growyourbiz.kodak.com.