(September 04, 2008) At this year's Document Strategy Forum in Chicago, Sept. 10 - 12, Xerox's Shelley Sweeney and Karl Kaneen will lead sessions about how adding personalization to documents and using an efficient, automated workflow to produce them can help businesses better connect with consumers and increase response rates.

According to the 2007 USPS Household Diary, the number of household bills, statements, confirmations, requests for donations, and bills/confirmations for charitable organizations totaled 31.9 billion in 2007. To combat this information overload, marketers are turning to personalization and print applications that add relevant, promotional messages to bills, statements and customized direct mail.

Sweeney, vice president/general manager of Xerox's Service Bureau and Direct Marketing Industries, will lead a session titled, "TransPromo in Action: Fitting the Bill." It will focus on application-geared lessons from Staples, Reader's Digest and other companies that utilized marketing database information to develop customized direct marketing campaigns – with the help of the Xerox 1:1 Lab.  Seminar participants will learn techniques to obtain relevant customer data and how to use that information for a data-driven campaign.

"Incorporating promotional messaging into bills and statements can both boost the appeal of a transactional document and generate a higher read rate for the marketing message," said Sweeney. "The key is relevancy.  Consumers don't mind relevant marketing – in fact, they embrace it." 

At the PODi AppForum this year, Sweeney lead a session that talked about Canadian Heritage Education Fund's success adding personalization to a direct-mail campaign. Previously printed in mass quantities using offset technology, the new digital, customized, color marketing solution boosted response rates by 191 percent.

Kaneen, Xerox FreeFlow Product Manager, will lead a session titled "Converting Transactional Documents into Promotional Collateral: Making Information Effective," and discuss the challenges and benefits customers face when changing their workflow to migrate from traditional transactional documents to transpromo collateral. The session will highlight industry practices and new tools that are bridging new digital technologies, making collaboration easier than ever.

"One of the big challenges in creating a transpromo collateral is getting the data center, marketing team and creative staff connected," said Kaneen, "but by utilizing the right workflow technology, this process can be very efficient and work seamlessly into everyday business functions."