January 2009

TransPromo takes hold:
An overview of the market trends, emerging technologies, and early adopters of TransPromo document production. By Kemal Carr

The placement of marketing messaging in transactional documents, a basic TransPromo application, is not new to the document production industry. Organizations have employed marketing messages in documents in one form or another for more than 20 years. However, advances by technology providers associated with collaborative document design, document composition and personalization, integrated data analytics, and high-speed, low-cost colour print options enable user organizations to support wide spread expansion of high-quality TransPromo workflow production capabilities.

In conjunction with these technology advances, increased competitive pressures in the marketplace and economic pressures in the production arena are forcing chief marketing officers (CMOs) and document production organizations to search for new marketing initiatives, including the production of TransPromo documents that provide cross-organizational ROI. Enterprises that look beyond present siloed approaches to determining project ROI will find that large-scale TransPromo document production makes good economic sense.

White space on transactional documents is becoming a recognized asset by marketing departments that is too valuable to squander. Kemal Carr

Given these market dynamics, the time is right for TransPromo document production as part of an integrated enterprise marketing strategy that spans multiple customer touch points, including Internet, phone, and direct mail. In this article, Madison Advisors, reviews some of the key market trends and the vendor response from our recently published TransPromo Workflow Solutions: An Evolving Market Defined.

The emergence of TransPromo documents
TransPromo documents support enterprise business needs by placing integrated marketing communications in the most important enterprise customer documents (e.g., monthly statement,
invoices, letters, etc.). TransPromo documents garner more customer attention, due to their extremely high open-and-read rates (approaching 95%), than direct mail and, most importantly,
provide enterprise marketing with higher response rates to marketing campaigns and/or special promotional offers.

Madison Advisors observes a growing number of developing strategies around the conversion of monthly transactional documents to TransPromo documents. This shift opens the door to multichannel
TransPromo, mail, and electronic campaigns that drive stronger ROI over current separate direct-mail campaigns.

The relevancy of highly personalized and timely, and promotional data combined with well-designed,
attention-catching colour graphics enable enterprises to achieve the response rates they require to justify the addition of TransPromo functionality, including data analytics and high-speed colour printing.

Vendor community rises to the occasion
In response to the growing demand for TransPromo functionality, the vendor community continues to aggressively address the requirements of TransPromo document production on several levels such as enhanced document composition messaging functionality, demographic customer data analytics, and expanded workflow controls. More vendors now offer digital colour print technology for high-speed transactional document production than ever before. Kodak, InfoPrint Solutions, Océ, Hewlett Packard, and Xerox offer high-speed colour print systems that support the quality requirements of TransPromo documents.

In addition, through acquisitions and expansions of production workflow products, vendors continue to address the requirements of TransPromo workflow solutions. For example, BÖWE Bell+Howell’s expanded BÖWEOne product suite includes document composition and print stream transformation capabilities via BÖWEOne Compose and BÖWEOne Recompose, respectively.

InfoPrint Solutions now provides expanded capabilities in InfoPrint ProcessDirector (IPPD) which manages a wider range of production workflow functionality including document composition and document-level control. Sefas Innovation (Sefas) provides an extensive end-to-end TransPromo
workflow solution with its Open Print product suite while Océ continues to expand its PRISMA suite.

As for acquisitions, in early 2008, Hewlett Packard completed the purchase of Exstream Software and announced a new high-speed colour print platform. In March 2008, EMC finalized the acquisition of Document Sciences, allowing EMC to expand its offering in transactional content management, an important component of TransPromo document production.

Pitney Bowes acquired Emtex Software Ltd., in 2006 and integrated the Emtex VDE/VIP print-centric software products with existing Pitney Bowes DFWorks workflow solutions. Through its recent acquisition of MapInfo and Bluetree Direct, Pitney Bowes has further expanded its TransPromo production capabilities with location-specific, demographic and behavioural data capabilities, and increased Web-to-print and message personalization expertise.

In 2007, Sefas launched Producer, an expanded ADF control layer product that provides a Web-based production management system designed for large multi-site, multi-vendor operations. Producer enhances Sefas’s extensive endto end ADF and TransPromo solution. Sefas also offers expanded data stream input capabilities in Remake, its print stream re-engineering tool and major component of its TransPromo solution.

Market size and direction The market for TransPromo workflow solutions is difficult to quantify because it encompasses many segments of the overall document production software industry. An automated production workflow, for example, utilizes software functionality including:

• Data receipt, normalization and storage software
• Document composition tools
• Post-composition and print-stream transformation software
• Print management (EOMS) software
• Automated inserting system management software
• Workflow control layer including reporting software

Additionally, as the production workflow landscape continues to evolve, organizations are adding new functionality in the following areas:

• Data analytics software including enterprise database integration
• Campaign management software
• Response management software

In Madison Advisors’ Document Composition Market Study, Third Edition, we project the value of software licenses in the U.S. document composition market to be between $175 million and $225 million. For the overall document production workflow solutions market, including software that enables TransPromo production, Madison Advisors projects that organizations will spend another $350 million to $465 million on software licensing, maintenance, and professional services.

Overall, Madison Advisors projects the TransPromo workflow solutions software market between $880 million and $1.06 billion globally, including licensing, services, and maintenance. We project the U.S market to be 60 to 65% of the overall global market or between $528 million and $690 million for 2008.

2007 Market Size of TransPromo Workflow Solutions
Madison Advisors observes that the market demand for automated production workflow solutions that enable TransPromo document production is growing not only in the U.S. but in other global document production markets. Several markets, including Italy, Israel, and Australia have surged forward with TransPromo and are taking a global lead in the implementation of large-scale TransPromo workflow solutions.

Early adopter successes
As with any evolving market, the success of early adopters helps generate momentum for the rest of the industry. Around the world, innovative organizations have set the TransPromo wave into motion.

TransPromo in Canada?
Madison Advisors believes that the time for an aggressive move into TransPromo is now. While production costs will increase with full colour and variable imagery, CMOs are currently driving a cultural change. White space on transactional documents is becoming a recognized asset by marketing departments that is too valuable to squander. Bills or statements can become a tremendous revenue generator as opposed to a cost of doing business. They can efficiently and effectively cross-sell and up-sell clients on new products and services. Equipment and software are maturing, and marketing executives are looking for answers. Are you ready to provide the right
solution to your customers?

Kemal Carr, EDP, is the president of Madison Advisors, an advisory firm that provides thought leadership, advisory services, and research in the print and electronic communications industry. Kemal also acts as a principal analyst for Madison Advisors. He provides project-based
advisory services designed to assist clients with business strategy and technology selection decisions. To contact Kemal, e-mail kemalcarr@madison-advisors.com. For more information on Madison Advisors, visit www.madisonadvisors.com.