Transpromo Marketing
Striata's innovative electronic messaging solutions create new marketing opportunities, enabling companies to reach customers who use online payment portals and self service kiosks to pay their bills. These bill payment websites have become an expected fixture in transactional environments such as banking, mortgage, cable and telecommunications industries, and play a vital role in their overall strategy to reduce costs - especially those expenses associated with paper statements and billing.

While a successful online payment portal can help facilitate paper turn off and reduce the associated billing costs, it can also mean losing out on a one-to-one promotional marketing opportunity. Traditionally, customers receive bill inserts or 'stuffers', incorporating promotional content, in the same envelope as their transactional paper bills and statements. In most cases, this transpromo marketing opportunity is lost when a customer opts to view and pay their bill online.

For the services industries, where a significant amount of revenue is generated from customer retention programs, this can add up to a sizeable loss. This is where Striata adds significant value. Innovative transpromo messaging solutions replace this lost marketing opportunity. These are considerably cheaper and more effective than traditional paper bill stuffers.

Challenge: marketing to online bill payers

In addition to eBilling and Secure eDocument Delivery solutions, Striata provides payment confirmation marketing and transpromo marketing services to some of the largest financial service companies in the world. For example, Striata assisted GMAC Mortgage to effectively market their customer retention programs to customers who pay online. The challenge for GMAC Mortgage and subsidiaries like Ditech and Homecomings, was that it was difficult to reach customers who went 'paperless', with their highly profiled marketing initiatives. In order to address this issue, Striata implemented a sophisticated, customized transpromo messaging solution that collates customer payment confirmation data with profiling information, to generate tailored marketing offers. Thus effectively including the promotional material within the transactional communication.

Before incorporating Striata's solutions, GMAC Mortgage was sending out plain-text payment confirmation emails, which simply provided a unique confirmation number each time a customer made an online payment. Today, with Striata's solution, GMAC Mortgage is now able to deliver hundreds of thousands of unique, applicable marketing offers each month, within these same commerce-based emails. Each customer who pays their bill online receives an HTML payment confirmation email with three personalized promotional offers, as well as helpful hints for effective mortgage or loan management.

Every email also includes the name and contact information of the customer's loan officer - a subtle encouragement for customers to engage with their loan officers directly. In many cases, this has resulted in customer queries, previously channeled through the call center, being directed to the customer's personal loan officer. Not only does this reduce cost-to-serve in the contact center, but it also re-engages the loan officer, providing them with additional opportunities to up-sell to their customers. Integrating personalized, targeted marketing into payment confirmation emails is a perfect example of transpromotional marketing.

Striata's technology addresses the promotional marketing challenges of online bill payment portals by turning simple, plain text transactional emails into revenue generating marketing channels. While there are many more ’touch points’ to Striata's push eBilling process, the customization of a company's existing payment confirmation emails can be completed in a matter of weeks, and this offers a unique opportunity to market to customers who pay online.

The same functionality that Striata uses to ‘push’ an encrypted eBill to a customer's inbox can be used to ’push’ a transpromo payment confirmation email to the customer. Unlike promotions presented on a website, payment confirmation emails can be customized to include relevant, targeted and personalized marketing offers.

All commercial emails can (and should) be personalized according to customer demographics, business drivers and marketing criteria. Striata's advanced profiling engine enables clients to include pertinent promotional offers based on demographic (age, gender), psychographic (income bracket, purchase activity) and usage information, such as current product and service usage, length of service and billing address, as well as customer enquiry behavior.

Marketing best practices for transactional online bill payment

Incorporating promotional marketing offers within payment confirmation emails is particularly effective, as it is directed at recipients who are expecting and willing to receive the email. Customers paying online expect a payment confirmation email, so billers are ultimately targeting an expressly interested audience.

An added benefit, is that email marketing is significantly more cost effective than traditional paper bill stuffers. Unlike paper based promotions, billers can accurately track which promotions were clicked on, when, how many times, and by which customers.

This type of detailed tracking and reporting facilitates intelligent, revenue-based marketing decisions, derived from measurable customer behavior.

Transpromo Marketing - incorporating marketing offers within transactional emails - has proven to be an effective tool for many industries including insurance, cable and telecommunications, banks and lending services.