Transpromo Needs a Superhero - Part One

Transpromo is a concept that has been around for quite awhile, but like Superheroes, the concept has seen a surge in popularity and profit potential in 2008/2009. While gaining ground, there are still many hurdles to be overcome in the market at large and for individual solution implementers. Perhaps we need our own Superhero to rally around:

Who turns mundane business documents into personalized communications that have the lure of a siren’s song? Who cleanses data with a single laser beam stare?
Who knows exactly the right message to send and just how and when to send it?
Who leaps Transpromo hurdles in single bound?

The Transpromonater does. Yes, the Transpromonater– a superhero dedicated to stamping out junk-mail and delivering customer enlightenment one mailbox at a time.

If you’re not a superhero, or secretly are, but find yourself stuck in an office with some corporate kryptonite, you’re going to have to leap the Transpromo hurdles the old fashioned way – by focusing on people, processes and technology. Believe me; you won’t do it in a single bound. A successful Transpromo initiative will require a series of carefully orchestrated steps. A secret Transpromo decoder ring would be nice too, but you will most certainly need that tool of heroes and villains alike: the Master Plan.

To create a Transpromo Master Plan your organization needs to really understand what makes your customers tick and what drives behaviors like buying more products and services, recommending products to others, using self-service tools, or going over to your competition. This is just some of the information you will want to have in order to drive relevant messaging on your communications in a way that customers will respond positively to.

You also need to be an internal evangelist to help your organization understand what Transpromo is and how it can help your business. With all the hype on the topic, it would be easy to jump too soon and trip on your cape. For example, if your only mandate is to use Transpromo to sell something on your statements or invoices – you’re missing the big picture. Your transaction documents are just one of many channels for serving, and communicating with, your customers. Transpromo campaigns must work in concert with other customer communication vehicles.

Research from Forrester, TAWPI, Corporate Insight, Bancography and others suggests that starting your messaging in a way designed to serve rather than sell will give you better long term results. Several of these firms also note that consumers react differently to messages on their retail credit card or phone bill than they do on their investment or insurance communications. There are very few case studies available that provide measurable results for Transpromo initiatives. That means that you will most likely need to conduct your own research and refine your strategy based on ongoing measurement and feedback. There’s no better way to learn customer preferences than to ask them what they want and then observe their behavior when you give it to them.

Ultimately, your master plan should consider relevant messaging, on-statement advertising, coupons and personalized URLs (PURLs or CURLs). While relevant messaging is always, well – relevant, not all of the other components may be suitable to your situation. Analysis of your customer segments, customer behaviors at different points in the relationship life-cycle and the key behaviors you need to influence is critical. Further, what are the results that you hope to achieve from the behaviors you intend to influence? Are you expecting to increase sales, reduce customer churn, decrease servicing costs, gather more customer referrals or all of the above? What will it cost to achieve these results? What will your return on investment be? Do you have the internal benchmarks necessary to make your case? Do you have the resources to follow up if customers respond to your offer?

Wow - that's a lot of questions. But they need to be asked. That's all for today. Stay tuned for some thoughts on "selling the concept" and more on the Transpromo Master Plan.

PURLs, GURLs or CURLS – Personalization versus Relevance

Personalized URLs in combination with direct mail or email campaigns have emerged as a valuable marketing tool. A Personalized URL (PURL) is a web page or microsite that is tailored to an individual visitor. A common example of a PURL is a web page with a URL such as www.retailstore.com/johnsmith, where “John Smith” is a target prospect or customer who receives a direct-mail or email communications that encourages him to visit the web page. For each recipient within the campaign, the web address is unique and personalized to the recipient. The content of the web page (PURL) should also be tailored to each recipient through the use of variable fields allowing pages to be linked to a database that contains information about each potential visitor.

PURLs are a stark contrast to a GURL, or generic URL, which is more common in direct mail and email campaigns. For example www.phonecompany.com/SummerSavings where PhoneCompany is offering the same call to action to everyone who receives a campaign offering discounts to new customers during a certain time period (I think I’ve received 3 this week!) If the offer is compelling and the design is effective, a GURL can work pretty well. But a variety of research (PODi.org, Aberdeen, Jupiter) tells us that personalization offers a significant lift over generic campaigns, but personalization comes at a price.

While software can be purchased to allow marketers to generate PURLs at lower cost per URL, more commonly, marketers are using 3rd party services to generate the PURLs and track response. For third party services, costs range from .05 to .50 per PURL per campaign depending on volume.

Before spending the money, consider that the degree of personalization that can be created on PURLs is highly dependent on the amount of data your organization has gathered about its target audience. When good data is available, keep in mind that an overly detailed and personal level of information in a PURL may lead a visitor to feel his or her privacy is being invaded.

Here are the biggest drawbacks I see with PURL implementations -beyond the "Creep Effect" above:

1. Many marketers are so enamored with the idea of putting John Smith’s name on a web page that they don’t spend the time making sure that the page meets John Smith’s needs;
2. Often, John Smith’s needs aren’t radically different than, say, Karen Jones’ needs. In fact, there may be only a handful of drivers that make the campaign relevant to the individual.
3. Relevant messages are more effective than those that are only personalized – so a PURL without a relevant message is a poor use of resources.

The real driver of response rates is relevance rather than personalization. PODI.org cites research indicating that relevant campaigns generate, on average, 300% better response than those that are simply personalized. The level of customization to make something relevant to the recipient is usually not 1-to1 or even 1-to100. It may be more like 1-to-10,000.

Here is where Customized URLs or what I call “CURLs” come in. You can tailor a particular web page to the level necessary to make it highly relevant to each group of recipients. Perhaps tailored by length of relationship, level of purchase power, industry or region. You can still personalize the direct mail or email campaign that directs the recipient to the website. For example,

“Dear John,

Pharmaceutical executives like you spend an average of $4,000 per year on rental car expenses. Visit www.rentalcarco.com/pharmaexecs, for discount programs and other tips that can help you cut your costs by up to 20%.”

Assuming that the message was being sent to a list of 100,000 prospects and tailored for 10 different industries, this campaign could be launched with out any specialized PURL generating software or services. In contrast, the same campaign with PURLs would generate 100,000 individual microsites at a cost of $10,000 to $20,000 before the cost of the direct mail or email blast.

So save some money and still get results:

• CURLs are at least as effective as the typicall PURL implementation at a fraction of the cost
• Spend your time and budget coming up with great, relevant offers and supporting creative to increase response
• If you generate the CURLs internally, make sure you have a method for measuring response

Whether you use PURLs, CURLs or GURLs using combining direct mail with online media to get your message across and measure response is a big step in the right direction.

Elizabeth

Another Opening, Another Show: AIIM 2009 Surprisingly Bright

Returnees from the just-concluded AIIM show in Philadelphia – sorry, the Info360 event – likely are feeling more positive about what they experienced than they thought they would when they first arrived.

Weeks of bad financial news, slowing sales, and pressure to economize on travel no doubt left them feeling less than exuberant about the state of the ECM industry. But if their reactions were anything like mine, they came home feeling cautiously optimistic.

Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t as if the show floor and conference corridors were so packed that one couldn’t elbow one’s way into the room. But my session was full and its attendees fully engaged, and most of the vendors I spoke with indicated that the traffic in their booths at least was steady, if low level. So interest appears to remain keen, at least for a certain core audience, and in enough volume to sustain a certain level business in the months ahead.

Perhaps the biggest difference this year over the past several was a discernable shift of focus away from quote-unquote ‘content management solutions’ toward one on implementation tools and strategies. Data transformation, interoperability, and consulting services were as evident as imaging, ECM, and workflow systems on the floor and in the sessions, and the prevailing attitude seemed to be less the historical “what’s it do” than a new “git ’er done” (with apologies to Larry the Cable Guy).

No doubt, this reflects the unavoidable economic realities that are compelling organizations to cut costs wherever possible. “The faster we can put something in,” the thinking goes, “the faster we can reap the benefits.” As a result, SaaS had more of a tangible presence than ever before (at least as a talking point, if not an actual option), and social networking was, of course, at the top of everyone’s list – even if they couldn’t tell a Twitter from a LinkedIn from a Lincoln Log.

Broadly speaking, one of the more important discoveries may have been that we can now – finally! – speak in polite company about the notion of managing content for the purpose of delivering it to someone, somewhere, for some specific purpose. Until this point, content and output management have been considered such separate disciplines that any attempt to characterize them as occupying opposite ends of a single macro process was met with blank stares and the Scooby-Do head tilt.

Even now, it’s not that the two sides of this week’s event (AIIM centered on content and OnDemand on output) are going to be unified any time soon. But the conversations can now be held, and that, to me, is a big bright spot, for it represents the first step toward automating processes on a true enterprise basis.

How about you? What did you see that floated your boat? The conversation continues with you.

– Steve Weissman

Trends in Transpromo

Insight Forums president Elizabeth Gooding provides a video recap of her thoughts on transpromo (brought to you by Cary Sherburne at What They Think).

Supply Chain Meets Content Management (Comin’ Thru the Rye)

e-Discovery and Compliance Move One Toward the Other

Sitting in on a recent update of the rules governing e-discovery, I was struck by how similar supply chain and content management best practices are coming to be … of particular interest was Rule 26(b)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which says, in part:

Parties may obtain discovery regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense — including the existence, description, nature, custody, condition, and location of any documents or other tangible things and the identity and location of persons who know of any discoverable matter.

What this says to me (and remember, I’m not an attorney, so don’t try this at home) is that organizations involved in litigation – or wanting to protect themselves from it – must be able to identify not only which documents are relevant to the case, but any or all individuals who may have knowledge of the key information. Compliance officers, too, crave this ability, so they can demonstrate, for instance, that proper notice and access procedures are being followed.

As a practical matter, this means a whole lot of data must be collected about when the content was produced, what process it’s a part of, where it went (in what order), who viewed and/or acted upon it, and who else logically would know of its existence. This is a tall task, but it’s also not a new one, as supply chain managers have been doing this for years to keep their warehouses and manufacturing floors humming right along.

Bar coding is one ready answer in the supply chain context, and the technology is finding increasing traction as a document tracking tool as well. But more often than not, this tracking is being done at the document level, which means specific bits of content contained within those documents tend to go untagged and thus are easily overlooked – at least until a judge or opposing counsel orders a deep-dive into the details, by which time it may be too late.

What all this suggests is a critical need to manage and track content at a granular level, and to ensure process timelines and user access logs are maintained so questions about “who knew what, when” can be answered. In this, the model is not dissimilar to the tracking of packages as they move around the country. We’ve long had the ability to find out when a box was picked up, which truck it was put on, who the driver was, and who signed for the delivery. Now the trick is to accelerate the application of the same tools and techniques to content, and it will be interesting to see how this is best accomplished.

– Steve Weissman

Not-So-Random Thoughts re the Economy, E-Mail, and Social Networking

Spent some time last week at both an AIIM/New England chapter event (Happy 40th!) and the Gilbane Conference in Boston, and came away with a few distinct impressions:

• The economy may be slumping, but opportunity is everywhere. The difference is that organizations in boom times are more likely to invest in initiatives with longer-term payoff schedules than is the case today. So if you’re seeking a piece of the budget – either as an inside line-of-business executive or an outside product or service provider – you had better be sure your ROI numbers are locked down tight and show a return in less than one year.
  

• Email is losing its effectiveness as a communications tool. Once treasured for its immediacy and ability to reach a specific individual, its value has eroded in the face of proliferating spam, spreading viruses, and the overuse of impersonal bulk messaging. A DM News article earlier this year put a fine point on this by citing a Lyris Inc. ISP Deliverability Study that found nearly 20% permission-based e-mail messages sent to US-based ISPs winds up in recipients’ junk mail folders. So much for it being a medium for one-to-one communications …
  

• Social networking is all the rage … even if few seem ready to embrace it. In this, I was reminded of the early days of the Internet, when Web connectivity was top-of-mind for vendors and users alike, but neither could articulate any practical reason to use it. The good news is that the use of the word “social” suggests people (finally!) are in the center of the technology radar screen, which is where they always should be but too often aren’t. But no one yet really knows how technology – or maybe which technology – can best capture, manage, and repurpose the free-flowing and largely unstructured information that is being shared. The current answer seems to be like the old Life cereal commercial: “Try it, you’ll like it!” and for those with a well-defined audience and purpose, the potential (as before, with the Web) does seem vast.
  

– Steve Weissman