For marketers, getting a message heard in a world where advertising pervades every aspect of our lives has never been harder. With studies suggesting the average consumer in the UK and the US receives a million marketing messages a year, or 3,000 per day, getting the attention of existing and prospective customers is a real challenge.

Those in the transpromo market will tell you they have the answer. According to its exponents, this strategy of fusing promotional messages with transactional documents gives marketers a guaranteed window of attention.

At the European Trans­promo Summit in Brussels earlier this month, there could not have been more optimism for the digital print application. Organised by Infotrends, the two-day event hosted digital press manufacturers, print buyers and printers. The message was clear: "The time for trans­promo has arrived".

Déjà vu?
However, for those tracking the progress of this marketing strategy, this message may sound all too familiar. For as long as there has been digital print, there has been talk of the ‘time of transpromo'.

So is this another false dawn or are we about to see wide-scale integrated marketing and transactional thinking and printing?

A new study by Infotrends revealed the strength of advertising on transactional documents. Of the 2,600 consumers surveyed, only 1.3% threw away bills without opening them. That figure rose slightly to 1.6% when asked about statements.

This compared to 73.7% who discarded unread and unaddressed mail from unfamiliar companies; 45.8% who did the same with addressed mail from unfamiliar companies and, crucially, 31.8% who do not read promotional inserts in statements and bills. 

The explosion of affordable digital print on the market, combined with more effective data-mining software, has opened the floodgates to targeted marketing messages. In the UK, 80% of "transaction document owners" surveyed were using colour digital print for trans­­actions. Currently, 40% have tools in place to achieve targeted direct mail campaigns and 40% more plan to do so by 2011.

However, despite all this compelling evidence of the benefits of transpromo, the application has not become anywhere near widespread.

Mark Halford, sales director at DST Output, which lays claim to be the first UK firm to market with trans­promo, selling the concept from 2002, says that many marketers are familiar with the strategies involved with litho campaigns and are unwilling to change.

"Transpromo is a marketing channel and not just a printing technology," he says. "It has to justify itself and generate a return on investment. As a result, when you sign a client up to trans­promo, you take them on a journey, you have to take a consultancy led approach."

Halford argues that success in transpromo is not simply a case of having the latest press. "You are no longer selling a commodity," he says. "To make transpromo come alive, you need the data skills and marketing expertise, you are higher up the supply chain than printers usually sit."

Room for all
So, is transpromo simply for multimillion-pound turnover companies servicing businesses with millions of customers or can smaller printers get a slice of the action? Looking across the Channel, there is evidence that transpromo can be harnessed by the latter.

French company Data One has grown its annual turnover from €3.8m to €28m in six years, citing the adoption of transpromo as the key driver of that growth. Loic Lefebvre, director of the development group at Data One, says transpromo is not only for the big companies.

"We work with credit providers sending out 5m documents a month to smaller providers with runs in the thousands," he says. "Different clients are looking for different things, different speeds, quality and different levels
of personalisation."

A recent case study from digital press manufacturer Infoprint found that a trans­promo campaign for a hotel group resulted in a 15% in­­crease in response rate, a 39% increase in the number of stays and a consequential revenue increase of 30%. At the same time, waste from sending out multiple mailings on multiple sheets fell by 30%, resulting in a 100% point increase in ROI for the client.

Potential problems
Why, then, are we not inundated with transpromo documents? As Guy Buswell argues on the opposite page, one factor is getting departments of large organisations agreeing on a campaign. However, there are more fundamental challenges. Consumers are moving away from paper statements and printed transpromo could be one of those great ideas conceived in a dying market.

But transpromo could be integrated into online statements. In addition, paper bills will remain common for some time yet. Ultimately, therefore it is up to the printer to sell the concept to the clients. In a world of increasing focus on added value, transpromo is an application that ticks all the boxes and a sales push among UK printers would surely cement the long-awaited time of transpromo.