​“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
– Seth Godin

Your brand is an important aspect of your company's identity as a whole. It is an image of your company's vision, mission and values. Repeatedly displaying a unified and cohesive image is the best way to communicate your message to your customers and build their trust, which will positively impact your bottom line.

Your business-critical and transactional communications are the perfect vehicle to visually boost your brand's identity. Here are three ways your document vendor can help you build brand loyalty:

1. COMPLEX & DYNAMIC BRAND MANAGEMENT
   A vendor with experience in complex and dynamic brand management will work with you to create brand standards and design documents that integrate your brand across all entities. Centralizing the data management of your business-critical communications is crucial to streamlining the process for companies that operate a parent/child structure and manage multiple brands under a single umbrella.
   
   
2. PERSONALIZATION
   In today’s world, personalization is no longer an option- it is an expectation. According to Forrester, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
   
   Personalized communications create a better user experience and are the difference between disruptive marketing content and useful material.  By personalizing your business-critical and transactional communications marketing, customers will see you as a trusted source for valuable and relevant information, thus enhancing your brand identity. An excellent document services vendor will have complex marketing capabilities that allow you to target and segment your customers with automated business rules for more impactful marketing.
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3. STANDARDIZED FORMATTING
   ​Standardized formatting for all same-type documents will ensure that your customers recognize your brand instantly, as well as know where to find their information easily. Consistently formatted documents contribute to a more user-friendly experience and, as an added bonus, will reduce customer service calls.
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Click here to contact Lanvera and learn how we can help you effectively communicate your brand’s message to customers.

On Tuesday, May 16, 2017, Tornadoes struck Wisconsin and Oklahoma, damaging numerous homes and structures.  Natural disasters like this cause destruction and power outages, leaving many unsuspecting homes and businesses to salvage what has been destroyed.

Whether or not your business was affected by these recent tornadoes, it should give you reason to make sure you have a disaster recovery plan internally and with all of your vendors. Be it hurricane, tornado, flood, blizzard, or any other unforeseen disaster, it is critical for businesses to take the necessary steps to minimize any disruption in customer communications.

The Disaster Recovery Journal estimates that as many as 80% of all U.S. companies do not have an effective DR plan, which means any of those businesses could  fail in a matter of minutes if disaster strikes.

Here are three disaster recovery essentials to keep you in business by safeguarding your customer data and communications during future emergencies:

1. Secure Backup Facility
Should a natural disaster or unexpected technical malfunction occur, data and operations must be accessible from a secure, fully operational offsite backup facility to prevent system disruption. This is especially important for any of your vendors. Data must be comprehensively backed up at a secure location that features total redundancy of all online systems, databases, communications, form inventories, and operational facilities.

2. Data Archiving
According to the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council’s Annual Report, 60% of companies that experience mass data loss will shut down within six months of a disaster.
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Due to customer expectations and regulatory demands, many businesses are required to store data for longer periods of time, which means electronic archiving is an essential element to a DR plan.

3. Multi-Channel Correspondence
In the event of a natural disaster, alternate forms of communications are critical to a business’ survival. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, USPS mail service was suspended for weeks across several states. In order to still effectively reach customers when the mailstream is halted, it is essential to have multiple digital touchpoints to reach customers (think ePresentment, email, SMS, and social media correspondence).

• Email: Sending customer emails during emergency situations is a great way to keep communications up and running. Email servers are located globally, and it’s unlikely they will all be dead at the same time. Even if cell phone service is dead or a server is down, WiFi can still be remotely accessed.
• Text: Text messages require far less bandwidth and incur less costs than phone calls, and even when the ominous “all circuits are busy” recording is heard, texts will still go through.
• Social Media: Social media is similar to email in that it is hosted on a network of global servers, providing redundancy and fault tolerance.
• ePresentment: Electronic presentment through a direct link or online banking platform will allow your customers to log on anytime to view their account status.

When it comes to your business and natural disasters, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Ensuring your business, as well as your vendors, have strong DR plans will give you and your customers peace of mind in knowing you have them covered.
 
Want to learn more about disaster recovery?  Click here to access Cisco's Disaster Recovery Best Practices.
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Your loan profit margins are under constant pressure from borrowers, competition, regulation, inflation, and the economy. However, there are ways to offset these costs through strategically composed borrower communications. Here are five ways you can use borrower communications to increase loan profit margins:
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​1. Add Color. We don’t just mean a colored logo! A well-placed call-to-action in bright colors can do wonders in capturing your borrowers’ attention and influencing them to make their loan payments a top priority.
 
A good color scheme will have a significant impact on your digital and print document marketing response rates. This is proven to be true by a recent study conducted by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo, which determined that 92.6% of those surveyed stressed the importance of color visuals. If you want to increase speed-to-pay, make sure your documents are full color.

2. Go Digital. According to ACI Universal Payments, Americans pay more than half of their bills online. Create a unique and memorable borrower experience by providing applications that allow for easy online and mobile payments, as well as offering opt-in push notifications and SMS alerts. Offering these applications provides borrowers with multiple ways to make payments.

3. Segment Your Audience. Not all borrowers are the same, which means standard marketing will not produce the same response rate as segmented marketing. Incorporate targeted and personalized messaging in your documents by using business rules and workflows, and you will significantly improve your marketing ROI.

4. Utilize Dynamic Messaging. Dynamic messaging allows you to present strategic, real-time messaging to specific borrower groups by using your document ‘white space’ to market products and services that align best with each borrower’s needs. There are many ways to incorporate dynamic communications on specific borrower criteria, including zip code, gender and marital status, to name a few.

5. Implement Affiliate Marketing. Form partnerships with outside businesses to utilize advertising space on your borrower documents. This is an appealing opportunity to prospective advertisers because personalized borrower communications tend to have much higher open, view and read rates than other print and electronic communications.
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The Bottom Line
Strategic borrower communications can be used to improve your loan profit margins. By adding color, going digital, segmenting your audiences, utilizing dynamic messaging, and implementing affiliate advertising, you can put more money in your pocket.
Learn more about how Lanvera’s solutions can help you increase profit margins by clicking here to contact us.

Business-critical documents are an important component of your customer communications.
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As face-to-face customer interactions decline, documents such as statements and bills are quickly becoming the primary line of communication between your business and your customers. If designed and delivered properly, they have the ability to influence customer behavior, drive sales efforts and increase brand loyalty. That said, here are three common problems that may be hindering your business-critical documents:

Problem: Poor Document Design
Delivering poorly designed documents can damage your bottom line. Some examples of this damage include unnecessary customer service calls, low electronic adoption rates, customer frustration, lost marketing opportunities and poor corporate image.

Solution: Optimize for Readability and Production
By designing documents that are optimized for readability and print production, you remedy many of these issues, create easier to understand documents, and increase customer satisfaction. Formatting with tables, summaries and bolded headers makes documents easier to read and understand; and utilizing duplex printing, eliminating white space and consolidating numerous documents into a single envelope will lower production costs.

Problem: Codes and Jargon                                                               
Including codes, jargon and information that is confusing for the general public is a common customer communications mistake. When documents are optimized for the average person, as opposed to a processing machine or insurance company, document readability and customer satisfaction will significantly increase. 

Solution: Simplify and Eliminate 
Try using simple sentences and common words, while eliminating codes and industry jargon. A good way to benchmark if your statement has been simplified is to ask if the information serves a purpose, helps a customer reach a conclusion, or requires a direct action. Everything else can be eliminated.

Problem: Black and White
According to CCICOLOR - Institute for Color Research, the average person makes a subconscious judgement about a product, another person, or the environment within 90 seconds. Between 62% and 90% of that judgement is based on color alone.   Based on those statistics, it’s fair to say color is a key factor in marketing. However, there are many organizations that still do not leverage color in all branded materials- namely business-critical documents.

Solution: Full Color Print
A consistent set of colors expresses thoughts without words and influences audiences. If you want to up the ante on your brand’s document marketing and watch your ROI increase, start incorporating more color into your documents.
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For more information on how you can improve your business-critical documents by incorporating optimized document design, click here to contact us.