As organizations develop Trans-Promo communications, they discover that digital printing is a process which starts far upstream from the print room. Using transactional data to better understand the customer relationship, organizations create Trans-Promo applications that display the transaction details but also promote customer-specific products and services. These organizations recognize the value of variable data and use it to personalize customer communications.

Organizations adding promotional content to their transactional documents, such as bills and financial statements, have a better chance of getting their message through than those sending separate promotional documents or including additional promotional materials—such as inserts—into the envelope with transactional documents.

However, proper planning and technology are required to get the promotional message right. Organizations need to mine existing customer data for best-fit offers. Document composition software allows organizations to merge the promotional messages and transactional data without disrupting the document layout. Digital printers and automated inserters support this personalized production process.

This article offers an overview of the process for implementing variable data to create TransPromo applications, discusses products available for creating TransPromo appli- cations, and reveals where TransPromo applications are heading in the future.

Data Mining
Businesses collect customer data through daily interactions with customers. Core systems capture transactional data, such as credit card purchases, telephone calls, and stock trades. On a periodic basis, organizations create a summary document listing all of these transactions. They use personal data, such as a customer’s address, gender, or service selection to customize a transactional document or to include relevant paper inserts.

Data mining involves analysis of a customer’s transaction record to identify trends or patterns that fit the model for a particular offer. It is also applied to demographic data for finding new customers or fine-tuning contact lists. For promotional purposes, organizations utilize data mining to find suitable customers.

Data mining benefits both the organizations creating TransPromo applications and the recipients. Companies effectively identify potential new customers and expand the number of products and services used by existing customers. The higher level of precision marketing offered enables organizations to focus their marketing efforts and reduce the amount of generic marketing. As a result, recipients receive less direct mail.

Data mining challenges arise from distributed data sources. If an organization has its customer data spread across multiple lines of business and multiple databases, the data sources need to be merged before the data mining process can take place.

Privacy concerns lead organizations to avoid using variable data in Trans-Promo applications. Since data mining is based on personal and financial information, some companies minimize the use of personalized data to avoid ex- posing customers to fraud. Through the use of document composition systems, TransPromo documents can be built using business rules that act on personalized data without exposing the data to employees within the organization or embedding the data on the document itself.

Data cleanliness presents another challenge to data mining. Outdated and erroneous data entries lead to incorrect promotions. Entries with the wrong gender or age can lead to embarrassing retail promotions. Many organizations chose to avoid offering customer-specific promotions, opting instead for generic promotions across a group or subgroup of customers. Simply cleansing this data would enable them to pursue customer-specific messaging.

Software Solutions
In addition to data mining, companies need a method for personalizing transactional documents with embedded marketing messages and images that attract the recipient to the promotional offer. Document composition systems create TransPromo applications by composing marketing messages, taking advantage of white space on a document, and managing promotional campaigns.

These systems provide document de-sign interfaces which support embedded business rules that react to data inputs to control the presentation of content objects and elements on a page.

Due to the complexity of document design, often compounded with regulatory requirements for presenting financial and legal information, most organiz- ations restrict document layout duties to skilled document designers. However, to address changing market demands and emerging trends, marketing departments need access to document layouts for promotional messaging. Document composition vendors such as Document Sciences, slated to be acquired by EMC Corporation; Exstream Software, which signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Hewlett-Packard; GMC Soft-ware Technology; Metavante Software; Pitney Bowes Group1 Software; and Sefas offer marketing-specific interfaces for message creation and management that allow marketing professionals to create content without disrupting the overall document layout.

Document composition systems em-ploy white space management (WSM) to determine the amount of blank space remaining on a page after all transactions are positioned. The remaining blank white space can be filled with marketing messages or images associated with nearby transactions or customized for a customer based on activity or history. The placement of messages is driven by a combination of start/stop dates, message priority, transactional data, and page postage restrictions.

Document Sciences xPression suite includes desktop and Web-based interfaces for document design which enable users to compose and edit documents based on templates and submit the documents into an approval workflow or production. Document designers create new content or import content from pre-existing repositories. In addition, designers use page loops to combine data from multiple accounts or lines of business into a single summary document. The xPRS server includes a rule-based document assembly engine to process incoming data against business rules within the document template.

Exstream Dialogue supports TransPromo applications with a strong design environment, a specialized marketing message creation interface, and marketing campaign management. Dialogue Anywhere for Marketing enables controlled access to document templates by creating both message content and business rules. Messages can be re-leased/activated based on rules, any field from the input file or any system variable can be used to apply a rule. Dialogue provides enterprise personalization and consistent cross-channel messaging. Its marketing campaign management modules allow organizations to define, monitor, and adjust campaigns consisting of multiple marketing message sets. Based on success of a particular message, marketing professionals adjust the usage of it throughout the campaign.

GMC PrintNet offers interactive and marketing-specific clients to support TransPromo applications. Print-Net defines white space on the layout as a number of accessible fields which can be used for marketing messages. At run time, the composition engine fills the white space with optional content. The engine applies rules to determine priority and frequency of content. The content flows both vertically and horizontally to fill the remaining space. Once complete, the engine writes an XML-based log indicating which messages were inserted into each document.

Metavante offers its CSF Designer suite of software for high-volume document composition. The suite includes DesignerWeb which is a browser-based message management tool that allows users to create and edit message content. Marketing professionals view categories of message content and select or create new items within the category using a menu-driven interface. The product enables users to create robust messaging content comprised of text, variable data fields, images, color, and flowing transactional tables. The CSF Designer engine performs WSM via mandatory and optional message settings; the engine determines if the message fits in the designated area.

Pitney Bowes Group 1 DOC1 supports TransPromo applications with tools for data management and message creation in addition to traditional document composition. Pitney Bowes Content Author enables distributed users to create marketing message content and define business rules for the usage of the content. Message priority settings allow marketing professionals to rank the im- portance of each message. The interface shares settings and specifications with DOC1 Designer to control user access to document templates and position marketing content within existing template areas.

Sefas Open Print is an enterprise software system for the design, creation, and production of high-volume documents. Open Print MiddleOffice is a collaborative, browser-based document design module that supports reusable objects. MiddleOffice allows designers to define areas within a template as dynamic for WSM. Marketing professionals create conditional messages within text boxes and graphically assign conditions for each paragraph. Additional rules can be created to control the appearance of messages based on widow/orphan positions, white space, and postage for additional pages.

Print Solutions
Although data mining and document composition systems are used to build TransPromo applications, it is digital printers and intelligent inserters producing the actual documents. Marketing messages positioned in the white space on pages replace paper inserts and allow organizations to manage or possibly reduce postage costs. But additional emphasis must be placed on the message to attract the recipient’s attention.

Digital color printers provide the easiest method of drawing attention to specific marketing messages or to highlight important information for the document’s recipient. Organizations can choose from a number of production-level digital color printers, including toner, inkjet, and liquid ink devices. With operational costs per page ranging from three to ten cents per page, digital color printers cost more to operate than monochrome printers. When combined with the right software, though, organizations reduce the number of printed pages by eliminating generic inserts and promotional materials.

For TransPromo applications, high-speed solutions from manufacturers like InfoPrint Solutions Company, Kodak, and Xerox combine the print stream support and color output required.

InfoPrint Solutions Company’s Info-print 5000 uses water-based pigment inks under pressure to print at 720x360 dpi at up to 916 impressions per minute (ipm). The press controller supports PostScript and AFP data streams.

The Kodak VersaMark VX5000e uses multiple drops of ink to print at 300x1,200 dpi at speeds up to 1,430 duplex ipm. The VX5000e controller supports IPDS and PostScript data streams as well as VPS and PPML.

The Xerox 490/980, slated for availability in 2008, is a continuous-web printer producing output at 600 dpi and up to 493 two-up simplex ipm. The print engine utilizes dry toner imaging and flash fusion to reduce the impact of heat on the paper.

TransPromo Delivered
Solutions for building TransPromo applications require multiple technology components. Organizations looking to add TransPromo applications into an overall customer communications strategy will need to select the right components to fit their requirements and production environment. In addition, new aspects of TransPromo communications, such as electronic documents, create new opportunities for organizations to reach customers.

Organizations need to build an enterprise-wide document strategy which encompasses both printed and electronic communications. A document strategy covers the entire lifecycle of a document and plans for the collection and mining of personalized data used to create documents as well as reporting on the impact of the document on the production environment.

When companies evaluate document strategy they should approach document composition solutions and production solutions as integrated parts of the overall solution, as opposed to point solutions for a specific application. They may need multiple solutions as part of their overall document strategy to address near and long-term goals.

Richard Huff, richhuff@madison-advisors.com, is a principal analyst with Madison Advisors www.madison-advisors.com. Richard specializes in the assessment and imple- mentation of content management and publishing systems. He has experience with a wide variety of digital printers, content management systems, and electronic document delivery systems including RDMS and EOMS. He was the principal analyst for Madison Advisors Doc-ument Composition Market Study.

Mar2008, Digital Publishing Solutions