TMC.net has a short article on the quality of data used in Transpromo campaigns. The article cites a study in customer data standards conducted by direct marketer DsiCMM.

According to the DsiCMM study:

Government, credit card, mobile phone, banks and storecards emerged as the major offenders in large part, not because their data standards are substantially lower than the other sectors, but because they generate such high volumes of transactional documents. Misdirected bills and statements are most severely experienced by the 25-34 age group, with almost two thirds (62.2%) having received such transactional documents addressed to the wrong person, consistently reducing across the older age bands up to the over-55s at 25.4%. This is perhaps not surprising in that new home activity also tails off with age. However, even amongst the more static but wealthier empty-nesters aged 55 and above, still fully one quarter are experiencing misdirected bills and statements.

Yesterday, WhatTheyThink.com published an article by Barb Pellow on using data to drive a marketing campaign. In the article Pellow states, “Data-driven marketing starts with good data. You must work with your customers to examine both internal and external data sources. Internal data sources abound, and marketers must work across the array of internal data points. These include: Purchase or transaction histories; Customer service; Trade show leads; Prepaid business reply cards; Web leads.”

Earlier this month at Drupa, Océ demonstrated the new JetStream 2200 printing full color newspapers from around the world. We were printing and folding them in real time in the booth. People could stop and pick up today’s copy of the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Herald Tribune. The color consistency and image quality of the JetStream produced papers that were superior to the originals being printed half a world away.

Océ has been an active promoter of digital newspaper production dating back to the creation of the Digital Newspaper Network in 2001. In April we made our first foray into world of the daily newspaper with our participation in the Newspapers of America’s NEXPO Conference in Washington, D.C.. At that conference we had an opportunity to introduce ourselves to a market that is almost completely new to us. In preparation for this event certain market forces became clear to us that convinced us that our message was one that they would embrace.

The last couple years the newspaper industry has been under considerable economic pressure. Revenues from national, retail and classified advertising have plummeted - classified being the hardest hit with a decline of over 16% last year. The newspaper industry has been exploring the opportunities of making their content more individualized. They have come up with notions like content tagged to individual carrier routes, neighborhoods and a new concept called “micro-zoning”. The result would be a press run with lots of variable elements and versions. This is not the kind of work that their presses are designed to do.

Enter Océ and our digital message. Our experience in the transactional world makes us exactly partner that they have been looking for without even knowing it. Variable data printing, dynamic composition and advanced data management are some of our strong points and exactly the areas where their industry has the least expertise. When combined with the power of our production management software and our continuous feed printers it is truly a match that shows the way to the future of the newspaper.

In late June we will again be bringing our message to the newspaper industry at a gathering of industry thought leaders in Denver at an event called the second global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper. We have been selected to be a sponsor of this conference that it being hosted by the MediaNews Group. MediaNews Group is one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States situated throughout California, the Rocky Mountain region and the Northeast.

Transpromo is making its way into marketing conversations at at conferences, trade shows and in the boardroom according to recent article at MarketingProfs.

The article TransPromo Is Born makes the case for TransPromo or “onserts” as they refer to them:

ROI is the key driver for the success of TransPromo. Organizations face increased budgetary constraints, staffing issues, and both boardroom and investor demands for favorable quarterly returns. Business is focused on cost more than ever before, both on containment and measurement.

Leading-edge enterprises have been successfully, and quietly, achieving significant ROI on marketing spend using multiple tactics, including the elimination of additional inserts from statement envelopes, replacing them with a more sustainable option: onserts.

Read the rest of TransPromo Is Born at MarketingProfs .

Within our industry, there is an interesting debate about the definition of TransPromo documents. Is it a bill/statement that has promotional messages embedded? Does it have to be promoting a product, service, or just a call to action? How about simply educating the customer and cultivating the relationship? At the other end of the spectrum, there are proponents that have gone as far as to extend TransPromo to primarily promotional documents that are composed based on transactional data and a lot of business logic. Think of these documents as one to one marketing on steroids. So who is right? And how does this impact print volumes? And, why is it relevant?

It is relevant for those that are trying to defend the paper-statement, or the paper direct mail letter, or even the static brochure. The concept of TransPromo shouldn’t be paper centric.. It should be to nurture and cultivate a stronger relationship between supplier and customer, while improving retention rates, keeping the customer actively engaged in the relationship, and hopefully building enough trust that the customer chooses to grow the relationship over time. In this sense, using transaction information helps to engage the customer in a dialogue and improve the lifetime value of the relationship.

So, does this have to occur on a printed statement? Of course not. The best approach to nurturing the supplier/customer relationship is many coordinated and ad hoc touch points, driven by business logic, common sense, and a determination to develop mutual trust and respect. Remember the old adage that every employee is a salesperson? Well, perhaps we should rewrite this and say that every touch point is an opportunity to cultivate the relationship.

Can TransPromo save the paper-statement? Honestly, it doesn’t have to save the paper-statement. But by effectively implementing a comprehensive TransPromo strategy, the supplier gains a strategic strength that will link the print room to the board room. This might not save the paper-statement, but it will certainly drive many new print applications that will be tightly coordinated and integrated into the supplier’s business strategy.

Here is an example for the potential of TransPromo. When was the last time you received a coupon in the mail as part of an affinity program? You probably receive these all the time. I am willing to bet that you don’t always remember to bring them with you to the retail store. Am I right? But, the coupon did, in fact, “get you in the door”. After you pick out the product you want to purchase, and go to the counter and tell them you received a coupon, but didn’t have it with you, what is their answer (yes, I know some do this better than others)? Most likely, they tell you that you can’t use the coupon if you don’t have it with you. Seriously? Their promotion got you to change your behavior and come back to the store when they wanted you to be there and you decided to buy something. This is complete success! They aren’t going to reward you for that? Why not implement a registered coupon that is produced using variable data. It is tagged in their retail system and only you can redeem the coupon. You can do this on the phone, in person, or by mail. It doesn’t matter. The point is that you tell them you received a coupon. They look it up in their retail system and surprise!!! I bet you would be thrilled to have a positive experience where you know that the coupon wasn’t just another indiscriminate offer.

I think the lesson here is that we shouldn’t get fixated on the medium. Customers must come first and strategy should drive how they are engaged and cultivated. If we do it right, print will thrive. If we don’t, then the supplier may falter either way.

USPS’s Deliver magazine takes a look at TransPromo and a recent switch by Ford Motor Credit to use promotional offers in the monthly invoices it sends customers:

Ford Credit uses its monthly invoices to communicate with customers on everything from vehicle service schedules to special financing offers and new vehicle promotions. Guided by info gleaned from customers, Ford Credit tailors statements with marketing messages and promotional offers targeted to its customers’ buying preferences and patterns.

The declining cost of color printing and the increasing quality and speed of printouts influenced the division’s switch from preprinted, company-branded paper. The division prints about 175,000 statements daily — or about 42 million invoices each year. Ford Credit saves significantly on postage costs by reducing the number of inserts inside invoices and consolidating mailings. Although Ford executives don’t reveal specifics, they say the transpromo initiative is meeting the company’s expectations in terms of returns.

Head over to Deliver to read the rest of Keeping Your Eye on the Bill.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council has established a new thought leadership initiative the organization is calling “Precision Promotion: Timely, Targeted and Trackable.”

According to the CMO Council:

The “Precision Promotion” program is designed to help the CMO Council’s 3,000-plus members in 52 countries develop New Routes to Revenue™ at a time when companies are increasingly challenged by growing economic pressures and senior management’s mandate for top-line growth. The study will build on other CMO Council programs already delivering on the New Routes to Revenue™ theme; these include “Business Gain from How You Retain,” “Driving the Bottom Line from the Front Line” and “The Power of Personalization.”

Precision Promotion can be found online at http://precisionpromotion.org/

Industry consultant John Giles has released a new book that outlines 12 best practices that successful printers use to make money with digital services.

According to Giles, a quick printing industry consultant, most printers use only a fraction of their digital technology’s potential. “The printing industry is rapidly changing and the technology alone won’t ensure a printing company’s success,” said Giles. “Successful printers have integrated technology into the culture of their entire organization and use it to sell more profitable types of printing services. They offer the customer a higher value and no longer have to sell printing based on price.”

The book costs $49 plus $6 for shipping. It is available at http://www.johngiles.com/book.iml.

drupa 2008 has been called the “Inkjet Drupa” with many vendors demonstrating new Inkjet presses. The popularity for Inkjet-based printing systems comes from its substrate flexibility and speed that can’t currently be matched by toner-based counterparts. But at what cost do these new systems come? In the drupa halls and on industry Websites there has been a lot of discussion of the recyclability of papers that have been printed with inkjet.

On the Print CEO Blog Axel Fischer of the International Association of the Deinking Industry (INGEDE) states:

It is “a lot easier to recycle paper” - yes, if it has been printed with offset or gravure or dry toner. But not if it has been printed with current inkjet. This is the discrepancy at this year’s drupa: Green and inkjet are the main topics, but they do not match. Waterbased does not necessarily mean environmentally friendly. Because many waterbased inks cannot be recycled.

This is especially true for inkjet inks, no matter whether they are dyes or toners. They are not only unrecyclable for new graphic paper - even in small amounts, inkjet printed papers can spoil a load of recovered paper dedicated to be recycled for new newsprint or office papers. The current inkjet inks dissolve in the process water and dye it like a red sock (or here black sock) in the white wash. There it is the underwear that turns pink, here the fibers that turn so dark that the paper screened out of this broth will not meet any brightness specification any more.

Noel Ward of WhatTheyThink.com, responding to comments regarding to comments on inkjet recyclability states:

I keep hearing about the poor recyclability of IJ and no one except paper companies really want to talk about it. I’m in the process of digging into this to find out more of the dirty details, and I have also had the experience that when mentioning recycling to IJ engine vendors they redirect the topic. What I know so far is that IJ papers can be recycled, but not to produce most of us would call good quality printing papers. That may be okay for now, but not when thousands of miles of continuous feed IJ paper is being streamed off these new presses.

After the drupa dust settles, we will hopefully hear more about the recyclability of inkjet printed paper from the vendors that are bringing this technology to market.

OutputLinks reports on a new education program that has been certified by Xplor International for Electronic Document Professional (EDP) continuing educational credit.

The program on Document Production Best Practiceswill be offered for the first time in the US in Boston, New York and Washington, DC on the week of June 23, 2008. The course will cover concepts, technologies, and practices associated with automated transaction document production.

The course will by administered by acadami and taught by Bill Broddy edp, William J. McCalpin edp, and Michael Turton edp.

More information on Document Production Best Practices is available on acadami’s Website.

Bibliographic information provider R.R. Bowker last week released statistics on U.S. book publishing for 2007. Their findings suggest U.S. title output in 2007 increased slightly to 276,649 new titles and editions, up from the 274,416 that were published in 2006.

According to R.R. Bowker traditional book publishing was basically flat last year. While a “staggering rise in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books to 134,773, pushing the grand total for projected 2007 U.S. book output to 411,422 books.”

“The most startling development last year is the reporting of ‘On Demand’ titles, leading to a stunning five-fold increase of new titles in the unclassified category, which mostly consists of reprints of public domain titles and other short-run books,” said Kelly Gallagher, general manager of business intelligence. “It will be interesting to monitor this category in 2008 in order to get a sense of whether this is a sustainable trend or a one-year spike.”