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Typically, impersonal communications arise because of the numerous documents and channels companies need to manage. Letters, statements, bills, direct mail, and e-mails are all examples of crucial touch points companies use to reach customers.
To complicate matters, these messages are delivered through multiplechannels, such as print, e-mail, and Web sites. Given that these disparate channels tend to be managed manually by different supporting departments within a business, marketing and product owners must face the complexity of coordinating and measuring the delivery of key messages and offers to their customers.
Message content and targeted customer information is often authored multiple times, depending on the stakeholder. However, there is little control over this content and workflow, and version management is either ad hoc or non-existent.
As a result, firms have a hard time managing what goes out to customers, and, unfortunately, the lack of coordination can also result in erroneous or conflicting message delivery.
While technology advancements in message management have made it possible to resolve these challenges, many companies are not taking advantage of these new capabilities. To increase the value of your customer touch points in 2007, pay attention to the following top three trends:
- Clear and effective information design;
- Personalization and the delivery of marketing messages in compliance documents;
- A communications infrastructure to help unify messages delivered across various customer touch points.
Information Design that Works
Generally, credit card bills or bank statements are sent through a production process: an IT system pulls information out of databases, puts it on a piece of paper, and sends it to the client. The result is the industry standard—a black-and-white transaction statement.
For many consumers, these statements are difficult to understand and do not clearly articulate the next step in the payment service process. The more complicated the product, the more complicated the touch point. This is an ongoing challenge for industries such as healthcare and financial services that have a lot of complex information to communicate to the customer.
Effective information design focuses on the content, and the way it is presented to the reader. It ensures that a customer can logically follow the flow of the content, find information easily, and understand the message.
Solid information, coupled with creative design that reinforces the corporate brand, is essential to providing clear customer communications. It enables a business to easily transform its compliance touch points into customer touchpoints.
Marketing and Compliance Documents
Technology has come a long way in the last decade. As you transform compliance touch points into customer touch points, you also see the convergence of marketing communications, such as direct mail, with compliance communications such as statements and bills.
Take advantage of the capability that exists to streamline the delivery of messages through different channels.
For example, the first step is to conduct a communications audit of all key touch points, to identify and eliminate irrelevant or redundant mailing efforts. This might mean incorporating content from the direct-mail channel into bank statements or other compliance documents.
Streamlining communications in this way can reduce the quantity of touch points a customer receives, and increase the value of one particular touch point, making it more likely to have an impact.
The next step is to enhance a message's value by personalizing content. Companies have access to a wealth of information about their customers, which can be used to link the silos of information, and deliver a holistic communication experience. This information can be used to target specific content.
Compliance touch points, by the very nature of the information they contain, have a significantly higher read rate than a marketing-only direct-mail piece, which typically ends up in the garbage.
Taking into consideration that an organization needs to send the compliance touch point anyway, there is a compelling value proposition for sending targeted marketing content through a high-read-rate touch point the organization is investing in anyway.
Taking Control of Content
A communications infrastructure can help organize various touch points so that they reinforce each other as part of an overall communications strategy. A centralized process for marketing, and product owners to manage targeted content is important. To maximize a message's potential and ensure a coordinated program, it should be authored in one place for delivery across multiple channels.
In addition, by centrally managing targeted content, companies can gather important delivery and response statistics, which can then be used to further refine—or create new—marketing campaigns.
Once a business has established a unified view of the needs, preferences, and recent interactions with a customer, it can be more responsive to customer choices.
Delivering clear, customized communication is not an impossible feat. Businesses that take a 360-degree approach to customer communication and document processes will ultimately avoid the trash bin, and achieve more profitable relationships.
Nick Romano co-founded Prinova in 1998 and has been helping Fortune 1000 clients increase the ROI of direct mail, bills, and statements by creating and delivering clear, personalized communication across customer touch points.
author: By Nick Romano