By Pat McGrew, EDP, Kodak
For years I have had conversations with bill and statement product owners about the power of the customer document. It doesn’t matter if it’s a billing document demanding a payment, a statement informing the customer of his/her business relationship, or a notice sent to meet a regulatory obligation – if the customer receives it, then the document has the power to be your emissary. To do that job most effectively it has to meet three basic criteria:
- The document has to look official, including brand markings, typography and color palette.
- The document must have a design that makes it clear what the purpose is and if there is a call to action for the recipient.
- The document must not create confusion in the mind of the recipient.
The goal of looking official is to ensure that the recipient knows that the document is genuine and comes from the biller. One of the best ways to make the connection for the recipient is to design the brand imagery used in point-of-sale, direct mail and mass media into the essential mail that informs the relationship you have with the customer. In that sense, color can be an important facet of the bill or statement design.
Does that mean that you need to invest immediately in a full color digital printer for your bills and statements? The honest answer is no. Hybrid printing brings together the best of two worlds – offset printing for a shell that includes the brand colors, and black imprinting for the transaction data and messages. Is there more flexibility with a full color digital printer? Yes! You can incorporate variable color and images into a customer-centric design that enforces the brand
If brand color enforces the customer relationship, but dynamic color is not a necessity, what about data? Clearly, bill and statement producers have access to a lot of data, but in this case we aren’t talking about just taking data from a billing engine and putting on to a page. In this case we are talking about using the available data to create more of a conversation with the customer.
Mining customer data to learn about spending patterns, customer buying trends, customer payment trends, and reactions to marketing campaigns can be the most valuable set of investments you make. With data you can determine the most valuable customers, and those customers you might want to eliminate. You can identify the customers who pay on time, and those who need more encouragement. You can use the data to educate your customer about how to be a smarter customer. Data opens the door to reducing customer churn, increasing customer spend, and speeding customer payment.
So, which is more important: color or data? My vote is for data. That brings us to the end of this episode. Come back next time and let’s talk about some design issues.
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.