Blog

Get as Personalized as You Want

We’re so bombarded with marketing messages that many of us have become highly adept at filtering out most of them. Customers do, however, want to hear from the companies they do business with, especially if those companies deliver personally relevant messages.

Document personalization, or dynamic messaging, targets subsets of groups or even individuals with content that varies, depending on the attributes of the customer. Most research shows consumer engagement and response rates rise by about 20% when well-executed personalization enhances information that matters to recipients.

If you’re engaged in producing transactional documents, you’re in an ideal position to execute dynamic messaging strategies. Almost 95% of recipients open their transactional correspondence, whether in paper or digital form. Consumers pay attention to bills, invoices, statements, and forms.

You also enjoy your customers’ trust. They entrust you with sensitive private information and they rely on you to use the data carefully and with consideration for their privacy. Latest trends indicate a backlash brewing against companies that cross the line into intrusiveness, such as using data customers didn’t even know you possessed. New privacy laws restrict how you can use customer information, but regardless of the legal situation, explicitly deploying personal information without your customer’s knowledge is bad for business and will erode customer confidence.

Benefits of Dynamic Messages

Enhancing transactional documents with dynamic messages maximizes the value of the statement or bill beyond its intended use and can boost the effectiveness of your general marketing strategies. Dynamic on-statement messaging is very cost effective. You can add variable messages without increasing the cost of creating and distributing transactional documents.

Any empty space on a bill or invoice is an opportunity to up-sell or cross- sell your products and services. Or you can use the space to disseminate educational information, highlight time-sensitive instructions, support branding initiatives, or guide recipients to online programs with a strong call to action.

Also consider that good layout, pleasant colors, interesting images and reasonable font usage will engage recipients more intensely. Good aesthetics grab us at a deeper neurological level. Some options include color logos, PURLs, personalized ads, QR codes, bar codes, graphics or messages based on geographic location, age, income, or any other selected criteria. You can even micro target messages to individuals.

Personalization Mastery Made Easy

While organizations can enhance their documents with today’s software programs, few companies leverage the power of dynamic messaging. Data is more abundant and the tools are continuously being refined, yet the perception persists that developing and testing variable communications is too complex and time consuming.

Our Business Communications Center (BCC) can help almost any company master dynamic messaging without complex IT requirements. BCC is a robust software system that allows marketing, HR, and legal departments to create campaigns and manage personalized and segmented customer messaging.

An insurance company can tailor messaging to drivers’ ages, for example, but also consider state laws and regulatory information. You can insert messages with a few simple clicks, including images, rich text, or personalized details in fixed or dynamic areas. A feature called lost white space automatically inserts an ad of appropriate size at the bottom of a form based on how much space remains after contents are finalized.

BCC also protects the integrity of your stored customer information. For example, BCC will only include images if prompted by rules and conditions programmed within the document. Further security limits access to functions and information by departments and by individual users.

The power of personalization is now within easy reach. Watch this tutorial or call us for a demo.