BACK TO SCHOOL ON DOCUMENT MARKETING

In the United States, the beginning of the school year signals a two-and-a-half month sprint to the beginning of the holiday season. Over these next couple of months, you and your team will most likely be reviewing annual budgets, identifying strategic goals and building process improvements.
 
This time of year should also shift focus to your marketing plan and identifying ways to effectively reach your customer segments during the holidays. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent $626.1 billion on holiday gifts in 2015. This solidifies the importance of using your business-critical documents to cross-sell and upsell your services, as well as tap into affiliate advertising. Your customers receive their statements, invoices and bills from you on a regular basis (in most cases, monthly) and using these documents to market to your customer base is an easy way to drive customer action.

Cross-Sell/Upsell: Parents of a young child who receive monetary gifts for Christmas could be persuaded to open a 529 Plan account for college funds. Customers wanting to purchase a car for a child or spouse will be searching for the best auto loan rates. Do you see where we are going with this? Customers will be on the lookout for products and services that best suit their needs and wants. This is a great opportunity for you to reach your customer segments with personalized, dynamic messaging that will drive them to contact you and request additional services.

Affiliate Advertising: The holiday season is a goldmine for B2C businesses. Did you know those businesses are willing to pay you for advertising space in your business-critical documents? Tapping into affiliate advertising will drive customer behavior and put more money in your pocket. It’s a win-win!
 
How to Cross-Sell/Upsell and Utilize Affiliate Advertising on Customer Documents

Historically, businesses have utilized transpromo marketing and statement stuffers to send blanket messages to their entire customer base, but today’s capabilities will reap benefits and results far greater than these generalized marketing messages of the past.
 
By outsourcing to the right document services partner, you can help improve your document marketing by making it:
 
1. Personalized: Face-to -face interaction continues to decline as customers are now able to do everything from transferring money to opening new accounts remotely via mobile apps and home banking. Statements, letters and notices are becoming a primary platform for businesses to engage with and cross-sell/upsell to their customers, but it is important that those messages be personalized and targeted to the individual rather than your entire customer base. 
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A good document outsourcing partner will implement business rules to target specific customers with personalized marketing messages, increasing the quality of marketing content and driving customer engagement.
 
2. Dynamic: The key to dynamic messaging is having the ability to change and update document marketing content at your own discretion and designate which customer segments will receive them. With this capability, you can create and change dynamic marketing messages when necessary and at no additional cost.

3. Multi-Channel: In order to effectively market to your customer segments, multi-channel delivery is of utmost importance. Digital delivery such as SMS, email and ePresentment allows your customers to view their statements, notices, etc. in a timely manner, meaning your marketing messages are being seen more quickly than traditional mail. Additionally, digital delivery gives you the option to enable clickable advertisements that drive immediate customer interaction.

When you couple digital delivery with print and mail, the marketing opportunities are limitless. You can either implement the same messaging to one customer segment across all document delivery platforms, or you can vary messaging so each customer sees different communications on their electronic documents versus what they see on their print documents. This can especially come in handy when you come across customers who fall under multiple segments.

Get back to school and have some fun with your document marketing so you can put more money in your pocket while making your customers happy! Contact us today for a comprehensive consultation on how you can maximize the potential of your business-critical documents.