Elizabeth Gooding is a visionary innovator in the area of relevant, personalized communications that drive positive business results. In addition to managing the Insight Forums blog, she conducts research on trends, technology and opportunities related to integrated, closed-loop transactional marketing (aka Transpromo), shareholder communications and social media. As the president of Gooding Communications Group www.GoodComm.net she leads a team of senior consultants solving problems with designing, producing and procuring business communications.

Committed to driving innovation in communications, she has launched a series of business networking communities for communications professionals on Linkedin - the Transpromo Professionals Network, The Financial Communications Forum, The Healthcare Communications Forum and Shareholder Notice & Access group. Previously, Elizabeth founded Art Plus Technology, which provided design and communications strategy to the financial, insurance, and healthcare industries for 20 years prior to its sale in 2007.

Elizabeth is the former editor of E.bill Magazine and is a frequent speaker at industry events such as AIIM, the Investment Company Institute (ICI) General Meeting, On Demand, NAVA Operations Conference (now IRI), the Gilbane Conference and Xplor.

Follow her on www.twitter.com/egooding

About this time last year I posted a release about the new retail sales branch opened by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey. Horizon was one of the first health insurance companies to take a “retail” approach to selling individual insurance policies under the then newly approved Affordable Care Act. In May of…

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Last week, Canon hosted a cross-section of prominent companies from the graphic arts, book, direct mail and transaction printing segments in Munich Germany. The majority of attendees, despite disparate business models, were evaluating the transition to inkjet or expanding on an existing inkjet implementation. The top three reasons cited:

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There nearly 1 million insurance agents and brokers employed in the U.S. and you would think that they would be fiercely competitive with each other. More and more, agencies are merging, consolidating and forming agency networks to compete with the real enemy – Direct Writers. Creating innovative communications has historically not been a core competency of insurance agencies but most recognize that this needs to change. As the demand for more effective and consistent customer touches continues to grow, agencies are looking for partners to help them execute regular, cost effective communications programs with their customers.

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54% of P&C insurers have core systems that are more than five years old. 78% regard their capabilities inadequate to manage new forms and levels of risk, such as those presented by cybercrime, terrorism and increasingly frequent and severe natural catastrophes. Opportunities abound for reducing the costs of producing documents in parallel with core systems conversion. Savvy service providers are positioning themselves to help insures take advantage of newly upgraded systems and a wealth of new data to improve their customer experience throughout the insurance lifecycle.

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Running a hospital or healthcare practice is already labor and capital intensive, highly regulated and impenetrably complex. The Affordable Care Act and the growing trend toward consumerism has added constant change to the list of industry challenges. While the ACA itself is the law of the land and implementation is moving forward, the foundational elements…

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It’s fair to say that the business model for health insurance is in the process of being completely redefined by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or ACA). Health insurers can expect to spend the bulk of 2013 getting ready for the new post-ACA marketplace. How far reaching are these changes? Well, they…

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Setting the right price in printing is a balancing act that would challenge Cirque du Soleil. Even the simplest factor in determining price – cost – is not that simple. Francis McMahon posted a while back on “The Art and Science of Competitive Bidding” citing the various complexities with estimating for digital inkjet jobs due…

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The term “Solution Selling” has been around for a while. Frank Watts laid claim to the term as early as 1975 at Wang Laboratories and started a series of “Solutions Selling” workshops in the early 1980s. One of his major clients for the workshops was Xerox. Subsequently, various spin-offs have emerged, each with its own…

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I have to admit that I’m becoming a true believer in the benefits of full-color white paper solutions. This is somewhat surprising since I’ve often been the person saying “black and white is good enough” for many of my client’s applications. (I made money designing those nifty paper stocks!) But, I’ve been watching inkjet technology…

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In the last couple of years, full color production digital printing has become a cost-effective reality for many applications. Many more marketing departments are considering adding color to transaction documents or making their color direct mail pieces more dynamic (rather than printing black over color shells). This led me to ask some of my colleagues…

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 “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Think about that for a while.”  Quote from Tim Robbins as Nuke Laloosh in Bull Durham (1988)  Some analysts seem to think that composition tools are pretty simple…

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In prepping for this post, I called several service providers around the country, primarily regional firms that I’ve known for a while. I tried to focus on companies that used to mail to me when I was with Art Plus Technology. I started working on this thinking I would get a whole bunch of great examples to show. Instead, I got several types of responses to my request to “speak to the person who handles internal marketing for the company rather than marketing services for clients:”

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Let’s face it, most participants in the RFP process (from either the Issuer’s or the Responder’s perspective) don’t profit from it. You would think that the Issuer would always benefit but, in fact, they usually only achieve cost savings in trade for

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In theory, if you really want to find the best solution at the best price, you need to talk to a lot of different suppliers and be willing to review a lot of bids. But who wants to source 100 vendors – or even 20 for that matter? In the past, I have always encouraged my clients to issue a short “Request for Information” or RFI in advance of the RFP process.

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I would just like to say to Matteo Bologna – with great mustache comes great responsibility. If he takes typography as seriously as his mustache, the man is very, very serious.

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