Are your clients’ looking for more cost-effective ways to drum up sales? If so, encourage them to look at their existing customer base.
Research shows that a new customer can be seven-times more expensive to sell to than an existing customer.
One good place to start is the essential customer communications your clients’ are already sending, such as account statements and bills. These documents are considered “must read” material, capturing the attention of its recipient for an average of 3 to 5 minutes!
This is a practical eternity when compared to other channels – such as email – where recipients spend only an average of 15 seconds.
White space has never been so profitable
A key characteristic of these documents is their inherent white space – representing prime real estate that can be used to host “free” marketing messages to up-sell and cross-sell products and services. Savvy organizations have been viewing these white spaces as billboards for years.
Examples of incorporating marketing messages into transactional documents to trigger purchase behavior include: coupons offering additional savings on future purchases, information on new products or services, upgrade messaging and sales promotions.
The evolution of transactional printing
Today, the potential of maximizing a document’s white space with hyper-targeted marketing messages can be fully realized –but that wasn’t always the case.
Historically, pre-printed color shells were produced on offset presses – typically with static marketing messaging – and warehoused until needed. Variable transactional data was later added via laser imaging on cut-sheet or roll-fed continuous feed printers. The marketing messages targeted to the consumer were lightly segmented, at best.
Today, the emergence of digital inkjet presses and automated workflows has eliminated the need for a two-step process. In a single pass, high-quality, full-color variable data statements can be produced with a “white paper workflow”. This completely eliminates the need to inventory pre-printed forms while reducing human touch points and potential errors.
Making communications work harder
As your clients look to reduce spend and better manage their costs, you can position transactional marketing communications as a way to optimize their customer touch points.
By including marketing messaging into communications already destined for the mail stream, significant cost savings can be obtained by consolidating the number of mailings sent to consumers.
How can you get started in offering printed transactional marketing communications?
Be sure to download our Transactional Marketing eBook, which is full of industry trends, market insights and practical advice to help you capture these opportunities.
Want more? Our Market Segment Series provides key insights and strategies to help you unlock new growth in seven business-boosting application segments – including Direct Mail, Digital Packaging, Photo Publishing and more.
