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Q&A:  The following are questions with answers that we were unable to get to during the live webinar event:

How much testing is usually required? Will clients share ROI stats with the service provider? How much volume is required to justify full variable digital color (are two machines needed to insure delivery commitments)?

These questions really depend on the customer, the job and the customer’s desired time to market with the implementation.  The NBS customer base varies from large financial institutions with a very rigid, time consuming, change control/approval processes, to small municipalities that are very informal.  NBS relies on our account services group to work closely with the customer to develop the concept, program, test, and approve each change. 

Coming from a service provider’s perspective, what is the best type of company to partner with to get started with transpromo?

With our transactional statement printing customer base, the marketing concept comes from within the client’s organization.  NBS is responsible for delivering the document in the most efficient, secure, cost effective manner for our customer.  In our search of the market for partners, it was most important to find a company that has a suite of integrated tools that allowed us to easily manage content, automate processing, integrate with our existing workflow management tools, and had a low learning curve for the programming staff.  We found the GMC product suite to be the best fit for our organization.

My company sends statements out via email.  Do you have any suggestions as to how Transpromo might still be viable?

The same concepts apply to e-mail statements and printed statements.  There is white space on the e-mail statement….use it effectively.  The benefit of e-mail statements is that it also offers the opportunity for interactivity.  Customers can be offered links on the face of the e-mail statements to special promotions that are closely aligned to their interests.

At a high level, can you define the solution components  / capabilities that make up a TransPromo operation. i.e. high speed ink jet printers + datamining  + software (content mgt system) + etc

Digital Print Technology….The transpromo market isn’t a “chicken and egg” conundrum. Digital color presses are clearly an enabling force driving the transpromo market. Organizations can now affordably colorize critical transaction information and key promotional messages to capture a customer’s attention. Study after study has proven that information printed in color is far more likely to be retained than information printed in black & white. Organizations can now leverage data contained within the transaction document to personalize customer communications.
There are a number of new digital color print engines as well as enhancements to existing printers that are making it easy for organizations to colorize documents. Well-known vendors like Kodak, HP, the InfoPrint Solutions Company, Xerox, Canon, and Océ are delivering affordable and “high quality” solutions to the market.

In the past, per-page costs were also an issue. Justifying high-volume production was a challenge. Operating costs have dropped significantly and depending upon the color coverage, costs can be as low as 3 to 10 cents per page.

Software Tools......There is no shortage of solutions when it comes to document composition software. Tools are available from a variety of companies, including GMC, PrintSoft, and Document Sciences. This document composition software is used to embed the business rules for transaction tables and data-driven messages. The software processes the personalized data to create a unique document with personalized graphics and promotions to each customer. Then in-house resources or print service providers use high-speed production printers to output the documents.

Integrated Data and Development of a Relevant Offer....Probably the biggest challenge is data mining across the silos of data in an organization.  That data needs to be combined with a relevant offer that resonates with the consumer and drives them to take action.

It would seem that transpromotional document production is going to be a much bigger opportunity for captive printing operations (in-plants, corporate repro departments) than it is for commercial printers...is this correct?
Early on, print service providers were the market leaders in digital color and distributed the cost across multiple client applications. Today, with print service providers having shown the way, corporate production centers and in-plants are starting to invest.  Commercial printers and data service bureaus are still well positioned to make transpromo a reality.  Commercial printers also need to look at transpromo as a relationship where the prospect has “opted-in”.  That extends the definition to a broader range of documents beyond simply statements.  It could be the notice from the veterinary clinic about a pet’s appointment or the dentist’s reminder, where savvy marketers are appending coupons to drive product sales.

With NBS, does the customer control the content and are able to preview the message?  Does the GMC tool allow for the end customer to input and manage the campaign?

NBS builds custom web based solutions to allow customers to maintain their own content and we offer content management as an additional service offering to our customers.  GMC has a variety tools to allow customers to manage content, as well as, GMC can be used a composition/proofing backend engine for custom solutions, like we have done.

If the message is on the statement, how do you get it to the right person/decision maker?

A number of transpromo documents are sent to consumers.  That typically means that the messaging was intended for the person opening the document.  In a B2B environment, the results are not the same.  The statement or invoice is sent to accounts payable and you may want to reach marketing…that’s where you need to leverage traditional direct mail.

If your current business is commercial printing or promotional direct mail, what sort of data security issues come in to play when you are handling statement/invoice data?

There are many issues. There are a variety of privacy regulations that come into play that impact how data is received, managed and destroyed, as well as how proofs and documents are transmitted. While many companies have solid policies for encrypting raw data for statement production, their processes often fall down when it comes to transmitting proofs for viewing and for managing test files – most test with live data. The latter issue becomes a particularly big issue when you have a bug that you need to resolve and the vendor wants you do send the data that blew up the system – your contract may prevent you from sending the live data, or live production output to your software (or printer) vendor. As a service bureau – you need to make sure that in signing privacy agreements – you also make sure that the customer can provide test data that is not subject to those privacy agreements.

How does the introduction of TransPromo applications align with or impact your output management issues?

By output management, I assume you mean meeting the customer’s mail date service level agreement (SLA).  If we can reduce the number of additional inserts going into an envelope, most of which are printed off-site from the main print center, NBS can better maintain its production schedule.  It also opens additional service offerings to existing customers.  Instead of full-color inserts being printed somewhere else, delivered to NBS, and inserted during finishing, NBS offers content management and data management as a service to our customer, closing aligning us with our customer.

Transpromo is a result of collaboration between multiple internal lines of business...finance, accounting, servicing, marketing.  How in these examples did the organizations start to gain collaborative agreements across "party lines".

Often it takes an outside party to make them aware of the benefits of collaboration and to facilitate getting the process started. Many times the different groups almost speak a different language, so there are a number of consultants and resources that help them to develop a standard nomenclature for messaging and educate them on setting up effective distributed marketing processes. Some companies can get this started on their own – but most are silo oriented.  It does take someone from marketing or operations to decide that they want to drive change to reduce cost or enhance messaging.

Does NEPS have its own digital presses? What kind of presses are they?

No, at NEPS we are technology and print-location agnostic. We develop transpromo applications that are produced and printed at the client site, or produced and printed at a service bureau and quite often we develop and host applications for our clients and then drive the print back to their in-house site, or to a network of third party outsource providers (for print and e-presentment). The most common color printers we see on the market for transpromotional work right now are from Xerox and Kodak.

Does the GMC software replace the design software such as Exstream Dialogue or does it work in conjunction with these utilities? Also, couldn't one simply use the existing software utilities that are out there?

GMC Print Net and Exstream Dialogue are two of the top competitors in the composition tool market. GMC also offers some tools that could be used in conjunction with Dialogue. You are correct that many companies may already own other composition tools that could be used for creating transpromo documents.  What they may lack are data aggregation tools and content workflow tools to surround the composition tool.

If you have questions about this webinar, please contact Eric: eric@whattheythink.com

About GMC Software Technologies

GMC Software Technology helps businesses implement high impact, personalized communications that increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, drive new customer acquisition, improve productivity and cut costs. Our award-winning PrintNet software is an easy to implement, end-to-end solution that provides full data integration and processing, design and composition, collaboration and approval, distributed output management and process automation for highly targeted print and electronic communications. GMC offers exceptionally reliable technologies and services based on worldwide ISO 9001:2000 certification and CMMI development methodology.  We serve thousands of users worldwide, and many of our customers are producing in excess of 100 million personalized documents per month — including direct mail, statements, bills, policies, catalogs, correspondence, and marketing and TransPromo materials.  .

For more information visit www.gmc.net or call (1) 800 250 1850.

About WhatTheyThink.com

WhatTheyThink.com is the printing and publishing industry's leading online media organization; offering a wide range of publications delivering unbiased, real-time market intelligence, industry news, economic and trend analysis, peer-to-peer communication, and special reports on emerging technology and critical events. Serving a membership base of more than 50,000, WhatTheyThink.com also hosts webinars and live events as well as providing content through a syndication program, which delivers content directly to related websites and through RSS.

About Barbara Pellow

Barbara Pellow recently assumed responsibility for the development and delivery of two new services at InfoTrends specifically focused on the evolution fo the Graphic Communications Market – The Business Development Service and Custom Communications Service. Pellow has served in a number of roles including the Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. In the role of Chief Marketing Officer, Pellow was responsible for all marketing activities for the division, including marketing communications, public relations, marketing intelligence and advertising strategy. She was an active participant in developing business strategy and helping define the group’s go-to-market organizational structure.

Prior to joining Kodak, Pellow was the Gannett chair in integrated publishing sciences in Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) School of Printing Management and Sciences (SPMS). She has also held senior marketing roles at IKON Office Solutions, InfoTrends, Xerox and IBM.

Pellow can be reached at barb_pellow@infotrends.com.