Are Your Monthly Statements a Wasted Opportunity?

- Using routine correspondence to drive revenue -

By Kevin Craine

- Despite the increasing digitization of business today, companies from all industries continue to spend millions of dollars to print and mail millions of customer statements each month. These account statements, however boring, mundane and paper-bound, support the business workflow of most organizations. Indeed, without these routine business documents most businesses would simply see no business at all.

The cost to process, print, mail and deliver monthly statements and other customer-facing transactional documents is a significant expenditure for most organizations. While your stats and numbers will vary, let’s assume that it costs your company approximately two dollars to print and mail a simple, single page customer account statement. Now multiply that two dollars by the number of account statements that go out the door every month. That number can easily reach into the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Monthly Statements as Marketing Tools

Monthly statements represent more than simply a cost of doing business, they can in fact be vital and valuable marketing tools as well. The reason for this is that transactional documents, like bills and statements, get noticed. Customers are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each day. And most of those messages get ignored. But invoices and account statements almost always get attention. One study from research firm InfoTrends found that monthly statements are opened and read by more than 90% of consumers. This is a powerful finding. What other type of marketing communication can claim that kind of customer open rate?

The White Space Opportunity

How can you begin to take advantage of your monthly statements as revenue-generating marketing tools? One way is to tap into the opportunity of White Space. Consider that on any conventional account statement, for example, there exists open, or “white,” space that does not contain any text or images. Depending on the design of the document and the content included, that open space can be significant – sometimes an entire page of unused real estate. Using this white space to present targeted messaging and relevant content can turn a boring and expensive account statement into a vital tool for marketing; up-sell, cross-sell, and extend brand loyalty and customer experience. Response rates for generic direct mail are disappointingly low -- just over 1% -- but response rates for personalized and targeted transactional documents can jump by as much as 500%. Herein lies the often overlooked opportunity and value of white space.

Next Generation Tools

New tools and systems are available that give businesses of all sizes and types the ability to easily and affordably leverage unused white space on customer-facing documents. Imagine including the following customized message on an order acknowledgement document, for example: "Thanks for your order of 100 BBQ grills. Use this code to get 10% off an order of BBQ tools." There is perhaps no better opportunity to increase that order size with additional products and services. And since it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one, white space messaging makes good business sense since it helps you make more money from your best customers…the ones you already have.

Moving Forward

Organizations are finding untapped opportunity using white space in more intelligent ways. A new generation of document generation tools is making dynamic white space management an affordable reality for companies that have in the past lacked the infrastructure, budget and technical expertise needed to make it happen. Are you ready to move forward? Enlist solutions and partners that provide the right mix of expertise, vision, and advanced capabilities that will allow you to leverage the full marketing value of your unused white space.

# # #

Kevin Craine is a business writer, technology analyst, podcast host and industry influencer. He is the author of the book Designing a Document Strategy, host of Everyday MBA on C-Suite Radio, and a respected authority on business process improvement. For more information or to contact Kevin visit CraineGroup.com.