Could transpromo be the saviour of direct mail (DM)? Patrick Headley, sales director at GI Direct, thinks so. Headley first outlined his definition: “Transpromo is the convergence of statement printing and DM, with two main ingredients in the mix: transactional print and proactive marketing.”

Transactional print comes in guises; every day, statements, invoices and cheques are printed, often using some form of variable print technology. Traditionally, such items have been mono printed with a lot of unused space, but firms are now seeing the potential of this space for promotional advertising.

To confirm that there is money to be made in the sector, Headley drew on figures from US-based research agency InfoTrends, which estimates that in 2006, the North American transpromo market for applications printed digitally in full colour totalled 1.62bn impressions and is forecast to top 21bn impressions by 2010.

Since 2005, DM has become an increasingly crowded market with falling volumes, particularly in financial sector. Only a small percentage of mailings are being read and if inserts are included with bills, they can be easily thrown away along with the outer cover. In contrast, messages printed on the bill itself benefit from bills’ 95% read rate from consumers, who will spend between one and three minutes reading a bill, that’s a long time in this busy world. According to InfoTrends, 63% of people prefer advertising on bills compared with other media.

What has brought about this move to transpromo? According to Headley, it’s down to the development of combined kit for producing digital colour print – transpromo is most effective when it uses colour and bespoke images – and variable data, reducing capital expenditure. “Traditionally, colour digital print has been expensive, but this has changed. Equipment manufacturers have produced printing kit for the mass market and production costs are much reduced. This, combined with increased quality, makes good transpromo printing possible.”

The benefits of using digital technology are many: reduced costs for storage of pre-printed stock, a flexibility in production and the all-important inclusion of dynamic personalisation, which boosts effectiveness. It also benefits from lower labour costs and shorter production times by combining all the production elements in one place.

Headley has significant experience of this new market. GI Solutions has positioned itself as a complete marketing services provider offering end-to-end, fully personalised, direct response mail production in a single process. To do this it runs four Screen Truepress Jet520 at a purpose-built unit at its Leicester facility. Its clients include 34 of the UK’s top mailers and its group turnover in 2007 was £27m – a 22% growth on 2006.

Headley concluded by saying that transpromo presents a real opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell for a print companies. “It delivers a pertinent message, can be tailored to the recipient and adapted based on past transactional history – with a bit of insight, there really are very few limitations to what can be done to get a message across to the consumer.”