Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 14)

resources together with the right technology allows the marketer to create business rules that enable them to send an offer for sporting equipment only to those customers who regularly buy sporting equipment. More speciﬁcally, marketers can offer ski equipment only to those who have purchased winter sports gear within the last two years. Companies can go even further with promotional creativity and relevance by sending out the offer in time for holiday shopping—and only to customers who pay their bills on time. Studies show that 64 percent of companies lack a formal strategy for using their customer data—but depending on your ability to target your messages to your individual customers, you can experience up to 20 times the responses over a generic message. This requires accessing information from several different—and often segregated—sources, as well as the ability to analyze the data according to given rules or criteria, then match the offers to the appropriate recipients. And all of this has to be accomplished according to increasingly shorter go-to-market timetables and promotional cycles. Following the TransPromo Path The software (and the hardware) for this type of very high-level, highreturn TransPromo program already exists and has been successfully implemented worldwide for almost a decade. If you are just starting down this road, however, it’s important to seek out software that serves as a platform that can accept data in any type of format and produce any type of output. It must provide enough ﬂexibility to create a range of targeted, relevant marketing messages, including graphics. And it’s critical that it is user-friendly and ﬂexible enough so that business users across the enterprise can generate these targeted messages. Furthermore, the solution must be able to automatically prioritize these targeted messages by user-driven rules to ensure the best messages are included in the available white space of the communication. Another key feature you will want to look for is the ability to store whether or not a customer responded in a database. This not only allows for that all-important capability of measuring the effectiveness of the TransPromo campaign, but also makes it possible for responses (or lack thereof) to messages to become the trigger for subsequent messages. For example, an initial mailing might ask if a bank customer is interested in receiving more information about credit cards or other bank services. A “yes” answer can automatically generate the second mailing Studies show that 64 percent of companies lack a formal strategy for using their customer data—but depending on your ability to target your messages to your individual customers, you can experience up to 20 times the responses over a generic message. with a form to ﬁll out or direct the customer to the appropriate page at the bank’s website. TransPromo is not limited to print, however. Marketers can create online or interactive applications as well, with the right technology. Nevertheless, with each round of outreach and response—or no response—the organization learns more about the customer for followup and subsequent promotions. Today’s digital printers can produce both black-and-white and full photographic-quality color images almost instantaneously and more economically than ever before. Additionally, every page can contain different text and images. It’s best to choose software that allows you to insert customized, full-color graphics like charts and graphs based on each customer’s individual information that can be composed on the ﬂy, in full color, and then output to any medium. The identical images developed for print should also have the opportunity to be delivered through email. Sending customers relevant, effective communications, with a high level of personalization, shows you understand their needs and are working hard to serve them. If you have the right data, you have the ability to implement a powerful TransPromo program. Select the one that works best for your business model today and lay the foundation for more targeted offers in the future. Scott Draeger, EDP, is Product Manager at Exstream Software, which helps organizations of all sizes connect with their customers through more effective, fully personalized communications. Visit Exstream at www.exstream.com. 14 Innovate Spring 08 http://www.exstream.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008

Innovate - Spring 2008 Table of Contents 10 Tips for Successful Open Houses The TransPromo Path Escape the Complexity Putting a Price on Value A Welcome Boost to Hospitality Team Approach Earns Accolades Bound Together New Highs in Image Quality Transforming the Business of Processing Photos Predictive Maintenance Making the Right Choice Diving into Digital Book Production Doing More With Less Distributed Document Creation

Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008

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