By Konni Hoferichter, MD of LaserCom
It is accepted wisdom that the response rate to direct marketing initiatives runs in between 0.2% and 2.6%. Still, that is sufficient for many marketers to build a business, even though the volume of direct marketing has dropped in recent years.
Imagine if you could achieve the highest response rates in direct marketing history at relatively low cost. That is the promise held by transpromo, a relatively new marketing medium. (The word transpromo derives from the use of transactional documents to promote products or services).
Transpromo combines the power of new-generation printing technology with customer database analytics to provide highly personalised, even one-to-one, communications to large numbers of customers.
When combined with understanding of customer behaviour, transpromo can boost reponse rates of many orders of magnitude. Studies conducted by the Rochester Institute of Technology have shown that personalised communication increases response rates by up to 44%, personalisation and colour by up to 135%, and personalisation, colour and one-to-one content by up to 500%.
Wikipedia states: “Transpromotional documents combine CRM and data mining technology with variable data printing and location intelligence. This powerful combination reduces the cost of traditional statement printing by sharing the print spend with marketing spend, while reaching the prospect base of all exisiting customers. Many companies do this to some extent, including Chase Bank, Citi Bank, Comcast, American Airlines and Amazon.com.”
A company that has most graphically illustrated just how successful transpromo can be is Reade’rs Digest Canada, which depends on direct marketing. Readers Digest has consistent outperformed the rest of the direct marketing industry, sometimes achieving double-digit response rates, relative to the 1% to 2% of the rest of the industry.
However, the company was blown away when it achieved 74% increase in sales, and up to 83% increase in response rates for Reader’s Digest books through the Xerox 1:1 Lab in Canada.
In the South African market, I forsee the major area of application as being in the domain of existing invoices and statements: they represent an existing, or sunk cost, something companies simply have to do as part of their operational expenses.
