Trans-promotion to prospect for new customers

It is a well-known fact that marketing spend is skewed towards customer retention because of the time-honored adage that it’s easier to retain a customer than acquire a new one. Yet one cannot completely ignore the fact that customer prospecting is an important part of CRM activates that marketers are supposed to perform.

Trans-promotion is quite a recent technique that opens up a lot of possibilities for businesses to market their wares to prospective customers. It involves promotional literature on transactional documents of other businesses that are in some way related to your own. A great advantage of piggy-backing promotions on bills and transaction statements is that such documents are read carefully by people.

Any information presented using the right text, font, placement, and colors is bound to attract reader attention and the chances of the information being retained are greater. Also, these documents are kept for records unlike promotional flyers that are usually consigned to the waste basket upon reading.

Trans-promotion has evolved from businesses using the space on transaction documents for promoting their own products and services. However joining hands with other businesses opens up many avenues; for example a book publisher can team up with an online store to promote its latest offering. Cost is a major advantage here, space is already available, there is no extra postage cost, and often gestures can be reciprocatory. The communication can be scaled to any extent as it is a cost-effective solution. Also, given the amount of customer information available, it is possible to prepare highly targeted and segmented communication that carry maximum appeal for the targeted customer. Such joint branding activities are already popular in Japan and the USA, with European companies too taking notice of it.