It’s a broad journey, but it’s one that most digital documents travel. When a step is overlooked, the success, efficiency, or legal compliance of the document is at risk.

Creating Relevant Documents
“The document communication market represents over $20 billion of corporate spending today, with an average six percent compound annual growth rate,” states Kemal Carr, president, Madison Advisors, in State of the Industry: 2008 Document Communications Market, a study published in the December 2008 issue of DPS magazine. Recent challenges, such as a struggling economy, rising postal costs and regulations, and growing environmental concerns require that documents offer value and bring owners a real return on investment (ROI).

Communications flow from organizations to recipients in great numbers. One challenge in creating effective documents is capturing customer information for future marketing use. Multiple, unsynced databases challenge organizations from customer relations through mailing and accounting.

“Ideally you would have one database capturing customers in all stages of the relationship—potential, prospect/pre-sales, sales, and post-sales. It should integrate across the entire organization and connect with strategic, external partners that help feed data and intelligence into the system,” says Michael O’Leary, director, Document Outsourcing Consulting Service, InfoTrends, Inc.

Organizations find true value in communications by including meaningful messages. “By leveraging customer data warehouses and key information derived from other systems that interface to end users, many progressive companies find new and interesting ways to reach existing customers as well as develop prospective customers,” says Tod Pike, senior VP and GM, Imaging Systems Group, Canon U.S.A., Inc. “Having a database of information is not enough and most companies successfully driving effective marketing efforts invest heavily in structuring customer databases with information relevant to targeted marketing efforts.”

Personalized, profile-based documents are important, agrees Danny Mertens, business development manager, document printing, Punch Graphix International/Xeikon. Mertens suggests that profile-based communication represents any type of information allowing a personal selection of goods and services to customers in an original and personalized way.

“Increasingly, print must be targeted and relevant. The economics drive it,” says Jon Bracken, VP of marketing and channels for enterprise solutions, Kodak. Kodak Insite Campaign Manager is a product that looks for patterns in customer data in order for users to provide more relevant offers. “A lot of corporate enterprises cull information on their customers and prospects, but adopting and segmenting it to gain real knowledge is challenging.”

“It is all about using the right data to make the end recipient take action, and it’s all about making it relevant and pertinent to them,” explains Shelley Sweeney, VP and GM, service bureau and direct marketing segments, Xerox Corporation. Sweeney notes that Xerox opened its 1:1 Lab, at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada in 2004, to help customers realize how important targeted, relevant communications are to success. The lab analyzes traditional static direct marketing campaigns for Xerox customers and compares the results against a campaign using personalized messaging. In the study, college savings plan provider, Heritage Education Funds Inc., gained significant benefits, including an increased return rate of 191 percent.

InfoPrint Solutions Company, in association with the CMO Council, recently conducted a pilot for the Best Western hotel chain proving the success of TransPromo over static documents. Static inserts previously included with rewards program statements, were replaced with personalized and targeted promotions. Applicants for the credit card were boosted by 500 percent among those who received the TransPromo statement.

Document delivery method—such as printed direct mail, email, and Web sites—is another factor in document relevance. “If you communicate to somebody how they want to be communicated to, and communicate with the same message on multiple media, you track much better response rates,” says Bracken.

Pike says there is no question that digital communication methods will grow in size and importance. “However, the printed document continues to be a strong means of effective communication with customers.” He notes that the most effective communication is an integrated approach, combining both electronic and printed documents.

Digital Print and Production
Gerhard de Goeijen, VP of marketing for production cut-sheet solutions and software, production systems business unit, Oce North America, foresees new applications and technology enhancements that continue to grow the number of documents imaged with digital printing technology. Based on the current technologies, De Goeijen expects the digital print market to grow substantially due to two main variables, applications and technological improvements. He predicts more productive systems with increased quality and a reduced total cost of ownership.

“Technological improvements allow print providers and corporations to transfer from traditional to digital print technologies. We have only tapped the tip of the iceberg on the majority of applications transferring from traditional to digital. Digital technologies allow organizations to turn to what we call micro-targeting or localization for increasing response rates and increasing revenues,” says De Goeijen.

David van Driessche, director of marketing, Enfocus, notes two phenomena with the increase in digital workflow—more diversified documents and tighter deadlines per project. “More diversified material means shorter runs,” says van Driessche. “Tighter deadlines mean less time to fix mistakes if they happen. Both trends cause an increased importance for quality control throughout the workflow.”

Print quality is also important to success. “There is a move from information documents, which are considered a cost, to a communication document, a promotional sales tool taking the level of lithographic printing. The days of good-enough quality are over,” says Mertens.

Environmentalism and tight budgets are pressing topics for most industries, is electronic delivery the answer? Will we see communications move from print to digital delivery? These issues may slightly affect the amount of digital documents printed, but documents transferred digitally also present challenges to ROI. “Green initiatives continue to gain traction, pushing many to look at electronic marketing,” states O’Leary. “However, spam filters and excessive marketing over the Internet impact readership.”

The recent InfoTrends study, Trans Meets PromoÉIs It More Than Market Hype?, shows that printed mail makes a bigger impact. “Our study shows that 96 percent of bills and statements delivered by mail are opened and read. There is value in engaging physical touch to a document; it emphasizes tangibility,” says O’Leary. The study also reveals that those who open documents spend an average of two to three minutes reading them, with 20 percent spending over five minutes.

A weak economy may actually lead to greater use of digital printing. “The current economical crisis may temporarily bring a slow down in growth, but the long-term growth of digital color printing is a given,” says Mertens. “In fact, the current economic crisis may present additional growth opportunities for digital color printing. With digital, they print what, where, and when they need.”

“We see digital printing growing at a steady rate over the next five years,” says Terry Wieczorek, president and CEO, DocuLynx, Inc. He sees digital print growing at a steady rate over the next five years. “We are still a generation away from eliminating most print communications. Factors such as cost of print and delivery, along with an increase in computer literacy will ensure a continuous move in the digital direction,” he adds.

Proving Value
A printed document headed for the mailstream will most likely arrive at its intended destination if the sender uses a current, cleansed mailing list. This is one of the last stops for the document—where a recipient accesses their credit card statement, views a retail catalog, or chooses to use or recycle a coupon. However, it can be so much more.

“Finding ideal customers only happens when marketers can truly track all responses and link them back to a specific offer,” notes InfoTrends’ O’Leary. He says that this begins at a campaign’s conception, where the offer; delivery channel; and a barcode, coupon, or other IDs are implemented. “There also must be a mechanism to enter and track responses into a campaign management system,” he adds.

Sophisticated organizations take the time to track response to the document sent. Did the recipient respond to the personalized TransPromo offer that appeared on their credit card statement? Did they go online to visit the pURL that was printed in a catalog, then make a purchase using the printed coupon code? From here, marketers determine which method generates the best response.

Once a document is delivered, “Most marketers leave it at that,” states Lee Gallagher, manager, direct marketing solutions, InfoPrint Solutions Company. This is the time when marketers should look at the response and build off of it. “A lot of marketers forget that. They say data analytics is like looking in the rearview mirror since it’s based on past history. Predictive modeling puts response results back in and suggests what’s going to happen next—it’s that fine-tuning of the data.” For example, in InfoPrint’s pilot for Best Western, the group of customers who received the TransPromo document and signed up for the credit card offer were moved into a premium customer segment for the hotel chain. “They have a propensity not only to read, but to act,” says Gallagher.

Those who analyze responses derive added value from the document, instead of leaving it to waste. Tracking response to the document aids the development of future campaigns, weeds out uninterested or unqualified recipients, and creates a purchase history for more targeted communications.

Archive and Access
The digital document lifecycle culminates with technologies for enterprise content management (ECM), archiving, and storage. At this stage, document management (DM), records management and retention, and Web and digital asset management are utilized to ensure critical elements are accessible for the future and any necessary regulations are followed.

How do we harness documents, make them work for us, and preserve them? Whitney Tidmarsh, CMO, content management (CM) and archiving division, EMC Corporation, notes a figure from IDC, highlighting the incredible amount of digital documents produced today. The IDC figure states that the rate at which we create information digitally each day is equal to the amount of information that has been created on paper in all of history cumulatively. “There are huge requirements. How do you organize all of this? How do you make sure that it is secure and controlled? That’s really what CM is. In the digital era, CM has never been more relevant,” she says.

The case for digital document management strategies is strong, yet many organizations haven’t fully implement effective solutions. As noted in OcŽ Business Services’ whitepaper, Document Process Management: The Case for an Integrated Lifecycle Approach, “Business documents are vital strategic, financial, operational, and intellectual assets that are essential to daily business processes. Yet half of organizations rate their DM practices as less than effective.”

Tidmarsh adds, “With the evolution of Web 2.0, you’ve communally and individually authored content relevant to the business world. This changes the game tremendously. Layer on considerations around compliance and governance, long-term retention for preserving intellectual capital, and e-discovery. It’s getting harder, not easier—technology is the only answer. People just don’t have the wherewithal to do it all manually. CM is a crucial element of getting a handle on what they know, and how they add control, management, and organizational structure around information created daily.”

Legal risk and compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leech-Bliley, are key motivators for implementing technology in a digital document lifecycle. “As the cost of managing documents and records in a compliant manner continues to escalate, the ability to easily discover, access, and search across documents will be valued more, thereby leading to increased adoption of DM,” states O’Leary.

“The importance of ECM continues to grow as paperless initiatives, cost savings, and efficient work processes remain crucial business success factors,” says Brian Lincoln, senior product line manager, Xerox Docushare business unit. He predicts that the sophistication of ECM systems will grow as point solutions accelerate when vendors strive to provide more value and target specific niches.

“Given the requirements of database driven publishing and printing, ECM systems and archiving will become even more important in the future,” predicts Mertens. “After all, this is part of the backbone system any company will work from.”

The Digital Document Lifecycle
Documents communicate on a grand scale within every industry—advertisements announce the next holiday retail event, billing statements convey personalized marketing messages, letters request donations, and notices remind us to renew our driver’s license. Documents are wide and varied, but they follow a similar path from start to finish.