Opus Trust Marketing’s Mark Hetem: ‘It’s about choice’
Instead of destroying the requirement for its print capacity, electronic communications have been harnessed by Opus Trust Marketing to deliver an integrated service that protects printed statements and mailers.
People thought that electronic billing would be the end of the printed statement, just as they thought that email would render printed direct mail obsolete. On both counts, they have so far been proved wrong, and the canny printer serving these markets has positioned itself to sit astride both types of technology.
One such is Leicester-based Opus Trust Marketing, a specialist ‘critical document producer’ that runs a couple of big IntelliJet printing systems from Pitney Bowes (using HP’s inkjet web press technology) but earns 15% of its £20 million revenue from electronic services. Clients include household names in the power and water sectors – two of the most heavily regulated industries imaginable, meaning that it is imperative for Opus Trust Marketing to produce and distribute its documents with 100% accuracy.
‘Almost every conversation we are having with customers is about e-services,’ said sales director Mark Hetem. ‘It’s about choice. We will help with the journey of switching to electronic but if they want paper they can have paper. It still leads the way in engagement and within that you are also delivering marketing messages because it’s all part of that communication cycle.’
He has become accustomed to hearing people expressing the view that electronic communications must be a threat to a print service provider like Opus. That is why the integrated service is so important, he added.
‘People do say: is there not a threat to your print business, but we have invested heavily in electronic and the fact that we provide an integrated service that is adding value to the communications life cycle means that it actually protects our print business as well. We are seeing more companies using not just print and e-invoicing but also EDI (electronic data interchange), getting invoice data straight into their systems.
‘The power and water sectors get a high rate of churn, so they are very keen to offer a multi-channel solution to ensure that customers are really engaging in the most relevant channel with the most relevant content. Our printing systems facilitate totally dynamic or flexible colour printing. With the HPs here your content can be anything.
‘The key is to offer a full suite of services, so we are totally flexible on the production floor, have huge amounts of flexibility and configuration on the electronic side, and lots of value added on the postal side. We believe that when combined this offers huge business benefits to our clients.’
(XHEAD) Message understood
The challenge for Opus Trust Marketing, he continued, is to ensure that this highly technical, multi-channel message and the value of the offering, is understood by potential customers. The process of alignment with customer needs is constant and is aided by forums held every year at Opus to discuss innovations and the customer lifecycle with clients and prospects. Efficiency and effectiveness are always considered in discussions around the format and composition of critical customer documents, and the latest digital print production technologies are becoming increasingly valued by customers, with more than 90% of customers having migrated over to white paper production.
This was expected to happen through the graduation of bills and statements to the transpromo concept of combined transactional and promotional information in a single document. In fact, the drivers have been different, said Mr Hetem.
‘Hardly anyone has migrated to white paper production for transpromo. It has been first and foremost for production efficiencies, and now they are on that white paper platform they are ready to take that next step: 1:1 communication; totally dynamic content. Many customers have been hesitant to take that step because they felt their data was not rich enough, or they did not know what content to put in. The reality is that you get no more stock obsolescence, dynamic changes, the ability to merge applications and more efficiencies in production. That can lead to better postage savings too.’
On the subject of postal mailing, Opus Trust was one of the first companies to take up the new Mailmark barcode technology from Royal Mail last year – a subject that Mark Hetem says is ‘probably worth an article in its own right’. Mailmark provides web based reporting and analytics for high volume mailing campaigns. He said that customers are eager to make us of it, for both tracking and cost reasons, but that ‘there are things that we could do over and above what we are doing at the moment, if more data was available’.
