Most people think that improving equates to cost – but in reality moving to more intelligent client communications delivers costs savings in paper, power, carbon footprint (to count against your sustainable and green ambitions) but also in time by sweeping away the detritus that has built up over the years in processes and how teams & departments interact.

Whilst saving money is nice – generating profit is far more exciting. The costs savings we identified for our client resulted in them moving to a more finely grained marketing programme with an ability to react to the marketplace in hours and days rather than weeks and months.  Their messaging is now targeted to individuals and thanks to their incredible IT team and a little help in creative solution design from ourselves – the people in business and marketing can take control of all this power with minimal technical involvement.

Over the next 18 months they will move the 90% of their client base to e-statements and then introduce charging for paper statements.  The envelopes will be marked with the carbon cost including all production and delivery footprints. The individual savings for this organisation will be small – but the increased flexibility means they can introduce new products to specific individuals at launch and generate repeat exposure to the offerings across all of the communication channels providing a coherent message to each individual client.

I will share more about this client and their experiences as they launch and move through the initial phases of their project – we hope to share some of the designs they will be using on their statements with you after their main launch early next year.

This got me thinking about some of our experiences so I thought to share my response.A high level overview of the functions involved in a transpromo project are:

• business driving the why – defining the outcome, financial result
• marketing driving the what & who -  defining the offer, message & targeting
• IT providing the how – data, processing, transfer mechanism and maybe project control

As the scale and complexity of the companies shrinks – the edges of these become quite blurry and involve fewer people with less specialist skills – as the complexity of organisation grows – the edges get much much sharper and additional bands begin to appear between them (specialist data mining and segmenting teams/consultants/designers etc).

We have worked with all the areas involved in this process so we would say that external consultants can be useful at any stage – but we try to always work our way out of the project.  Once the people involved become experienced in what they want to achieve the role of the external consultant should start to reduce and the original need should for an external consultant will disappear.

The business probably has a clear idea of the outcomes they want to see and the marketing team will have an idea of how to turn this into an  the offer that appeals to their client base – but designing for a dynamic transpromo statement is very different to what most designers get involved with – so some external help at this point is useful and usual.

If they have segmented their client base already and built their customer journeys then they can probably work with their IT people to flag each customer record with a segment ID and then simply tie that to some offer collateral to be added to the statement.

This is what we recommend most of our clients do – it removes a lot of the need for constantly re-engineering the actual statements and business rules and simplifies production of the statements.  After all it is much easier to shift a clients segment ID as you learn more about them than it is to constantly tweak a statement design!

As for the marketing analytics side – that really depends on how the company operates! Our larger clients track response rates across call centres, branches, websites, IVR, SMS shortcodes, phone in numbers, offer codes etc. For smaller companies it is much simpler – watch the money!

The range and complexity of options for organisations is rapidly changing meaning that what was once impossible or too expensive for a smaller organisation is probably going to become available within 12 to 48 months in a more automated and simplified form.  Think how CRM has evolved from complex in-house implementations to simple SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings like SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.

Happy to answer questions – just email me via the contact form or leave a comment on this post.

• high quality imagery that is precisely matched to each client
• integrated messaging that links back to your core website marketing metrics
• near real-time response rate monitoring
• the ability to minutely tweak offerings to ensure they are performing at their absolute peak

- is that a yes I hear?  I didn’t think so.

The day after launching your e-statements is thrilling with everyone patting each other on the back for a job well done. And it is a job well done – just not finished.  We encourage our clients to maintain a 6 month change and improvement list that is continually driven by customer and staff feedback.  The reality of these systems is that if you are not actively driving the system forward you are likely only using about 25 to 40% of the systems capability – but for 100% of the price.

Where do you start to mine additional value from your e-statements? I know a very professional online marketing consultant whose favourite phrase is follow the numbers.  E-statements have the ability to generate click=through and viewing statistics.  They can be hooked up to your online analytic engines and deliver direct and above all accurate numbers to base your planning on.  So do it and camp on those numbers.  There is a period of base lining but after that you should be looking for improvements every single month.

Don’t just focus on the e-statements. Watching how people are reacting to your messaging across all of your channels allows you to use the feedback to influence future channel & segment plans.  There is nothing better than delivering a message on a statement that is repeated as the client logs into online banking and is also mentioned in the footer of an SMS message and appears on the reverse of a letter.  If the message can be tied to an eye catching visual this is even better as it simply drives home your offering and branding.

Consistency across all client communication channels. Make sure your e-statement messaging is backed up with targeted messaging on the website,  letters, SMS and other communication that is sent, and lets not forget the call centre and account managers they all have their roles to play in this.  The modern CCM platforms from HP/Exstream, Xenos, Thunderhead, EMC, Isis-Papyrus, iDocs, PitneyBowes and others are more than capable of managing this kind of concerted push – but even if you have a different system it can still deliver the key elements!

There will be gasps of shock and horror at the additional work involved when you first broach these ideas with the other departments involved in getting your statements produced, but those are just normal reactions to change.  Your vision will motivate your team other teams need to see different visions and benefits presented in wildly different ways.  This is where we spend a lot of our time and effort, bridging the internal understandings gap.

So how would I summarise this post? Do it, track it and react – keep changing and trying new ideas and never settle for where you are today.

Feel free to send me your questions about any of the information covered here or leave a comment below – you can reach me through the office on 0203 355 4006 or contact me through the website.

Until next time…

We hope our observations help you find areas where you can make improvements, extract additional savings or simply increase your results!

What do we mean by e-statements?

On the simplest level they are transactional account statements delivered over the internet either as PDF attachments to e-mails (we will ignore the security implications of that for this discussion) or as online web pages where a client can view and download a PDF as part of their online banking.

One of the main drivers our clients cite for moving to e-statements is that e-statements reduce their overheads whilst ‘improving the client experience’ – which is wonderful we agree, but misses the full impact that an e-statements project can deliver as part of an intelligent client communication approach.

Overcoming the ‘so what’ factor

Why do e-statements look the same as paper statements? This is where we see a lot of initiatives fail before the project has even started.  E-statements have none of the restrictions of paper statements – e-statements can use full colour images, text and the full power of your designers’ imaginations – within tastefully set boundaries of course.  So why not make use of the chance to truly enhance the power of the statements?

Creating a perceived value gap between e & paper statements is easy when you have a medium that encourages change. on each envelope. Differentiating your e-statements from existing paper statements through clever design is a starting point but online banking is more convenient and the information in the e-statements can be more easily understood if it is presented using the full power of internet standards.  So don’t hold back – you may even want to undermine you paper statements by printing the CO2 cost

Give people more! Barclaycard have a wonderful spending analysis tool. It displays charts with splits based on basic categories (food, entertainment, music etc).  VISA is doing most of the hard work as they provide the transaction categories in the data feeds.  This interactive chart is useful, in a small way – but it engages the customer which is far more important.   The client can perform simple drill down on their monthly and quarterly spending which allows them to feel more in control of their money.

The perceived value gap can be used to drive an uptake in the numbers of people switching to e-statements and online banking.  The savings our clients typically see come from three key areas:

• reduction in the paper being sent to the customer
• reduction in branch usage
• reduction in call centre account queries

Those reductions are wonderful things – but the real value is derived from where they see increases:

• increase in customer satisfaction
• increase in opportunities to deliver targeted offerings to individual clients
• increase in response rates to targeted offerings
• increase in measurability of marketing spend

We have worked with a bank that is using the above approach very aggressively and they have doubled the monthly sign-up rate to online banking.  In the future, as part of their corporate sustainability programme, they plan to charge clients for paper statements and these will be identical to the e-statements and produced in full colour – with the additional cost being covered by a subscription payment that includes carbon offsetting for the production and delivery of the statement.  That should happen within 18 months and will effectively move their statement run to a revenue generating activity.

That’s it for this post – feel free to send me your questions about any of the information covered here or leave a comment below – you can reach me through the office on 0203 355 4006 or contact me through the website.

Until next time…

Andy Copland

If you have a statement that you would like to share with us – we are offering a bounty for each example that is significantly different from the existing examples in our collection.  If you find one we are missing and are based in the UK you will be invited along to one of our evening events in London for drinks and nibbles.

If you are elsewhere in the UK or the world and can not make it then we will arrange for vouchers or specialist chocolate to be delivered to you.

We currently have examples from:

• Morgan & Stanley
  • Gold card
• Natwest
  • Advantage Private
  • NatwestOne Mortgage
  • various Current & Savings Accounts
  • Visa Card
• Barclaycard
  • Platinum Visa
• Abbey (awaiting Santander rebrands…get yours in quick)
  • Visa Card
  • Abbey Account (Current account)
• Nationwide
  • FlexAccount
• Citi
  • Credit card
• LloydsTSB
  • Platinum Mastercard
  • Classic Current Account
• Halifax
  • Platinum Card
• marbles
  • Credit Card

We are seeking examples from:

• HSBC
• J P Morgan
• Co-operative
• First Direct
• Cahoot
• SMILE
• Coutts
• Egg Banking
• European Islamic Investment Bank
• Europe Arab Bank
• Sainsbury’s Bank
• Tesco Personal Finance

CALL BEFORE SENDING US YOUR STATEMENT!

If you would like to share your statement with us call us first and we will talk you through the steps you need to take.  The number is +44 (0) 203 355 4006.

Once you send your statement to us we will secure it and de-personalise it even further and share it with you to ensure you are happy with the information it contains.

Other examples….

Do you have an example that you find shocking or just confusing?  Maybe it is a statement from a utility company that leaves you more confused after reading it than before you received it. Maybe your mobile phone bill leaves you bamboozled about your minutes.

We are interested in all of these so give us a call and we will talk you through the necessary steps to preserve your anonymity!

We look forward to seeing each and everyone of you at one of our meetings!