However, what is less obvious is that multichannel digital document presentation featuring secure statement delivery also presents an outstanding marketing opportunity.
Triggered transactional messages typically include statements, post-signup and post-purchase emails, password resets and registration confirmations, and have an average open rate as high as 40%.
Compare this to the single-figure open rates for traditional promotional campaigns. This latter fact alone suggests a powerful new way to create never-seen-before customer touchpoints by embedding personalised promotional offers within transactional messages distributed across bearers, including:
- email
- text, and
- Whatsapp.
The fact that companies are obliged to send monthly statements to their customers remains a missed marketing opportunity for many organisations. This is understandable as transmitting millions of secure electronic documents within a short space of time — at scale and across multiple digital channels — is a tremendous challenge.
One would typically expect an initial focus on getting the technical challenge right and less of a focus on remarkable customer journeys that could be initiated from a simple electronic statement.
Using this existing digital touchpoint companies and brands can further enhance the communication experience, with functionality like product recommendations linked to (for example) available loyalty points or take the opportunity to gather valuable feedback with online surveys.
The beauty of enhancing the lowly statement message with valuable marketing insights is that recipients are already in that receptive state that comes from giving permission to receive digital information from a trusted brand.
As most digital marketers know, timing and relevance are what drive open rates, but to truly drive purchases you need personalised offers. Combining the timing and relevance of the digital statement with personalised offers presents a golden opportunity for increased customer engagement and loyalty.
Seamless touchpoints that induce purchasing can be incorporated into statements when they are not viewed as a separate accounts department workstream.
Statements are just one type of transactional message that can be transformed into a secondary campaign asset. The appeal of statements, in particular, as a customer touchpoint is obvious from the ease with which promotional messages can be incorporated in the message footer, for example.
However, every time a customer completes any type of transactional action that requires a subsequent response from the organisation, it represents an opportunity to engage a consumer who has already granted permission and is in a receptive state to boot.
Oftentimes, the current or potential customer is quite literally counting the seconds until that transactional email, text or Whatsapp message arrives. Here is a golden opportunity to create deeper brand connections.
In these particularly challenging times, we're all looking for practical and proven ways to increase our Return on Investment (ROI). Doing statements differently — adding the bite to the burger, the pizzaz to the pizza — is a smart way to properly leverage what you're already doing. Brand-new, never-seen-before customer touchpoints can quickly be added to the outbound campaign effort.
Compared to making that regular trip to the rusty old postbox, most customers are delighted at the thought of conveniently receiving information on digital channels like WhatsApp, SMS and email. Now, it's time to up the ante by turning digital transformation into a valuable marketing opportunity.
For more information, visit
www.grapevinegroup.co.za. You can also follow Grapevine Interactive (Pty) Ltd on
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