Ditch your website registration for paperless adoption

If website registration is required, more than 75% of your consumers will not adopt paperless billing.

For the better part of a decade, billers and financial institutions have been trying to get customers to agree to turn off their paper document and fetch it at their self-serve portal or internet banking website.

At the same time, those very same billers have been strongly advocating electronic payment.

Here are some high level statistics as of mid 2012:

• Approximately 65% of all consumer payments in the United States today are electronic.
• Approximately 6% of consumer bills, statements, insurance policies and other documents have been turned off.

It’s hard to believe that electronic payments can be such a spectacular success, yet paper suppression is a complete and dismal failure.

The bottom line: If you require your customers to visit your website, register, choose and remember usernames and passwords; your paper suppression will plateau at well below 25% of your total customer base after 5 years.

What’s the alternative? Eliminate the biggest barrier to paper suppression

Electronic consent is the process by which billers, banks, and other financial services providers go about getting a customer to agree to go paperless by turning off their USPS delivered documents in favor of receiving electronic versions.

The most common approach is asking the consumer to register at your self-serve portal or internet banking website and at some point during this enrollment, present them with the opportunity to turn off their paper document.

The fatal flaw with this approach, and primary reason for overall poor adoption, is this very step!

The customer experience of this ‘fetch’ strategy is a poor replacement for the traditional paper envelope, and diluting paper suppression activity within a self serve registration process results in an even lower adoption percentage.

There is a far more convenient, cost effective and successful way to suppress paper: Electronic consent via email followed by secure document delivery

The steps are quite straightforward:

Step 1: Verify that you have an accurate email address on file. This can be done without requiring any website visit or outbound phone call.

Step 2: Send a highly personalized email that requires just one click to agree to go paperless (you can attach a sample of the documents to this email).

Step 3: Capture the consumers consent choice WITHOUT linking them to your website.

Step 4: Suppress the USPS envelope and begin sending all appropriate documents as secure email attachments.

It’s as simple as that.

Use of your self-serve portal/website is of course of critical importance too. We therefore incorporate an automated portal registration process that does not require any customer action, into the eConsent process. Ask us how!

Gaining partial vs. full electronic consent

In addition to the convenience of one-click consent, we recommend that you use this opportunity to gain consent for paper suppression across ALL your document types. That way, when you get the opportunity to suppress a specific document type, you do not need to go back again and again to gather additional consent. We know it sounds counter intuitive but in reality, your customers couldn’t be bothered to manage complex preferences, even if giving them the choice appears to be the right idea.

In conclusion:

To gain meaningful paper turn off adoption, ditch the registration process!

Garin Toren
striata.com

Are you disciplined enough to run your own email marketing campaigns?

The ongoing upsurge of the online audience, social media, mobile and eCommerce coupled with the overall evolution of the average consumer, means that email campaigns, whether they include marketing offers or operational documentation, need to cater to the needs, wants and lifestyle of an increasingly savvy online consumer.

Be smarter with the way you use email

The role of email in an integrated online campaign is best described as a launch pad. Email can act as the window to the digital world, where with one click you can quickly access Quick Response (QR) codes, video, music and other exciting content. As the launch pad, email should include transparent functionality (tracking, deliverability techniques, interactivity and intelligence tools) to enhance the customer’s experience and direct them to detailed relevant content where a website could be one of the multiple landing strips.

Email is not just about promotion

Email allows you to engage with customers and take them on a journey through to the sale and a flourishing, persistant online relationship. It enables the ability to share the customer’s favorite content to their preferred social network or allow them to make a payment from within the bill.

The email might be read on the go or saved for later, so it should be available on a variety of devices and platforms and when implemented correctly should result in a great return on investment, while cutting paper usage and costs at the same time.

No pressure at all. I guess that is why they call email marketing a discipline.

Email marketing IS a specialisation

The strength of this marketing tool is not just about sending out bulk email. It’s about understanding the medium, tracking each email and making adjustments to future campaigns so that your goals are met. It’s important to note that email is not a one size fits all medium – you need to create your space where you are engaging with your customers in a way that brings results. And that doesn’t happen ‘automagically’. You need to ensure you have experts in this space to help you along the way.

6 Tips for getting smarter with email

1. Delivery
   Ensure you have measures like DKIM, SPF and DMARC in place, a great data cleaning method and authentication tactics, as well as automated bounced email clean up processes.
2. Open rate and subject lines
   Keep the subject line short, clear and be wary of using words that trigger spam filters. Personalize or customize the subject line. Use a recognisable' from' name that ensures credibility.
3. Creative design
   Creative design must transform strategy into a series of templates where the combination of layout, images and colour is functional, device friendly and easy to navigate, plus looks good and works online. The creative elements of the campaign must not only work for the target audience, but should also represent the relevant brand effectively.
4. Mobile email
   Design with mobile in mind. Remember that if mobile email is the launch pad, the destination pages or functionality must be tested to ensure compatibility with all mobile device types.
5. Add value
   Be relevant via a well segmented database, add call-me-back functionality and link the reply address to a tool to assist the call centre. Add a poll for insight and feedback, a survey for data enhancement. Include a phased profiling solution and a preference centre to help customers be in control of their communications.
6. Cut costs
   Don’t send to inactive customers, continuously bouncing addresses or invalid domains and aim to run regular harvesting and adoption campaigns to reduce paper.

Now get going, there is a lot of work to be done! Call an eMarketing specialist and start sending smarter email.

Sheryl-Lynn Collins 
striata.com

Digital migration: You could be saving $500k in print and postage!

Do you know exactly what your company’s targets are for print and postage savings over the next two years? Not having targets could be costing you a fortune. I recently attended a 'digital partner strategy day’, hosted by one of our larger clients, which turned out to be an incredibly valuable exercise. What struck me most was how wide the spectrum is between a company with clearly defined targets for reducing paper communications and those that have done little more than ‘offer’ eBilling.

The gap was costing one client half a million dollars a year. Read on to find out how to avoid this...

The primary objective of this client-led 'digital partner strategy day' was for senior managers from several divisions to lay out their vision for digital communication and short, medium and long terms goals for migrating as many customer contact points to electronic as possible. They invited a very small group of best-of-breed partners, which included the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Adobe and Striata to share their thoughts on how to accelerate this process and enhance the client's vision for a truly personalized customer experience.

What is your true cost of service?

I was particularly impressed that this company has crystal clear targets for print and postage savings (something we encourage all our clients to do upfront). They established the volume and cost per communication type: each paper mailing, inbound and outbound phone calls, the impact per day of slow or late payments; and then segmented commercial customers from individuals. With the help of strategic partners, industry research and management they set aggressive, but achievable targets, which everyone within the company has agreed to. Buy in and accountability across all divisions is critical.

How can you commit resources without targets?

The majority of companies we meet with don’t have well defined targets. In fact, most don’t even have an accurate account of their communication volumes or costs, which are essential for setting targets. At best, they may have ballpark figures for how many paper bills are delivered, and a rough percentage in mind for eBilling adoption (usually based on the industry average). But they haven’t mapped out which other mailings go out to the same customer, and at what cost.

Imagine sending everyone in your company out on a scavenger hunt with no finish line, no timeframe and no encouragement to enlist the help from other departments. One of the biggest challenges in achieving these mythical cost reduction targets is that there is rarely any sharing of data across departments or communication types. This makes it incredibly difficult to get all the key stakeholders to swim in the same direction – let alone commit resources.

Half a million dollars a year down the drain

While conducting a discovery workshop with a prospective client recently, we determined that $1.4 million is spent every year on mailing their annual privacy notice, a regulatory requirement, which they believe very few customers actually read. This is a classic example of departments not working together, as more than 30% of customers are already registered for eStatements, and yet 100% of customers get the privacy policy in the mail. If you can confirm delivery via email, why wouldn’t you send it electronically for a fraction of the cost, and use it as an opportunity to drive more traffic to your website?

Start the discovery process today

Start by looking at your volumes and print & mail costs for each of the following:

• System generated personal documents – bills, statements, policies, collection notices etc.
• Triggered messages – welcome letters, payment confirmations, reminders
• High volume, low touch communications – all general notifications with no sensitive information – annual reports, privacy notices
• Inbound and outbound phone calls
• Another key data point is the total number of email addresses on file – across all departments and databases (including 3rd party vendors)

Use your full army, not just a handful of enthusiasts

Once you have a handle on these metrics, you can START developing your ‘digital migration strategy’, and set targets for print and postage reduction, email address collection, auto-pay enrollment, reduction of inbound phone calls, etc. This should be a collaborative exercise, not just within your organization, but with your key vendor partners as well.

Lastly, but most importantly, make a big deal of communicating your short, medium and long-term goals and get buy-in from everyone involved in moving customers to electronic communication, providing regular updates as milestones are achieved. Having a whole army of supporters is infinitely more powerful than a few fanatics fighting the battle in the dark.

Interested in a no cost, no obligation discovery workshop? Contact us today.

Barrie Arnold
striata.com