By Mandi McCoy
MAKING AN IMPACT WITH YOUR TRANSACTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS very month, like clockwork, your organization has a prime transactional opportunity with a captive audience — your customer. Whether print or digital, your company has the opportunity to interact with your customer to drive an overall better customer experience. Through the use of transactional communications, designing an engaging communication creates a personalized, interactive, colorful and promotional or educational message that encourages a long-term customer experience and satisfaction. But don’t lose sight on continuing to incorporate into your business strategy cost saving measures that support overall solid practices in operational excellence, postal optimization and multi-channel delivery preference. What Are Transactional Communications? Effective delivery of transactional communications continues to reinvent itself. With the rise of the customer experience and customer expectations, the preferred delivery method is just as impactful as the transactional content itself. These mailings include statements, bills, policy notices, EOBs, late notices and other time-sensitive account-level transactions. Research 14
MARCH-APRIL 2016 | www.MailingSystemsTechnology.com
suggests the average customer spends two to five minutes with a transactional communication; this is much longer than you’ll get with a direct mail piece. This is where you’ll be able to make a more impactful communication with the use of full-color messaging and Customer Communications Management (CCM) software solutions versus producing a black/white monochromatic communication. Target Color Messaging Incorporating a colorful, personalized strategy with targeted messages throughout a transactional communication will require an investment in production and operations cost. To help offset the additional cost, consider optimizing your mailing processes by combining smaller jobs to increase the postal density and take advantage of the second ounce free. By increasing postal density, this will help to qualify your mailings for lower postage rates and faster speed of delivery. As a suggestion, add an additional marketing page since the second ounce rides free. Instead of mailing a separate marketing correspondence, include the communication within the First-Class Mail transactional mailing for higher readability, lower postage and
faster delivery. To incentivize the move to color, the Postal Service specifically offers incentives in the form of a postage rebate at the time of mailing. As background, postal incentive programs were initially introduced in 2011 and have since developed into offering repeated incentives for more personalized color messaging printed on the transactional document. This year’s promotion is called the “2016 Personalized Color Transpromo Promotion” and offers an upfront postage discount to mailers who use personalized dynamic/variable color print for transpromotional marketing and consumer messages on their bills and statements. The Personalized Color Transpromo promotion runs July 1 through December 31. Registration for the program begins on May 15 and runs through the end of the promotional period. Service Providers Transform the Need for Color Mid to large tier service providers are well-positioned and equipped to support enterprise mailers’ high-quality, full-color inkjet needs that in-house operations may lack. This is due to high implementation costs of hardware, software, experience and the lower per sheet cost of color that