David Murken: I’m Daive Murken the National Sales Executive for CDS Globals On Demand Solutions Group.
Ken Williams: Hi, I’m Ken Williams, Executive Director of New Business Development for Smart Money Magazine and Smart Money Custom Solutions.
David Murken: Ken, we’ve done a lot of work in the last several years on working with your team in developing new applications for what a lot of people in the financial industry refer to as gap analysis documents. Let’s talk a little bit about what we’ve worked together on in developing these unique applications from a structural and substraight standpoint.
Ken Williams: Sure. One of the communications that we’ve used over the years to communicate to 401k participants about their retirement is what we call gap analysis, so that’s taking a look at an individuals contribution rate to their 401k, their age. We’ll take a look at even some of their investment holdings, do a retirement analysis so that we can communicate to them clearly about how much money they’re going to have at retirement.
So in the past we used all the technology that was available to us, all of the capabilities within personalization to really throw a lot at these participants. Tell them everything they ever wanted to know about their retirement picture and what we found over the years was that, you know, the participants wanted a few things, first they just wanted you to tell them very clearly without any clutter, you know, what’s the story. What’s my retirement going to look like and what do I need to do today in order to prove that picture
And so some of the new developments that we’ve done with gap analysis are not only focusing and targeting those retirement calculations and graphical representations of what their retirement is going to look like but give them clear action steps in terms of what they can do today in order to improve that picture. Most people just need a nudge in order to improve their horizons and so what we do is we identify maybe one to three next steps. And we’re just focused on that very next step that’s going to help them take one step closer to retirement and improving that financial picture.
And so we highlight that with specific call outs, we might, you know, create uses or graphics and arrows and things like that to really call their attention to that one or two items that they can do today to really help themselves out.
David Murken: One of the things that I recall early on when we were doing some testing with the program was the business reply card and the security around that reply card coming back that the feedback that you had received from your end clients was kind of a question about the security using the remoist glue the way that we developed the original substraight for you. Let’s talk a little bit about how we changed that application to make it a more secure document coming back into CDS Global for your outbound mail pieces.
Ken Williams: Okay, sure. One of the things that – traditionally we would send out enrolment forms or change forms along with these materials but that would be, you know, it lends itself to an 8 ½ by 11 format. It doesn’t led itself to something that’s much more retial marketing oriented. It also involved additional pick and pack fulfilment which added to cost. They might lose them. They wouldn’t know what to do with them when they opened up the package and all the items sort of fell out on the table.
So what we wanted to do was design a piece that basically was, it was inline, it was bound in within the piece but it was also unique and actionable. And so what we created was a gatefold cover with a perforation that they could actually tear that off and send that back in. One of the issues that you alluded to Dave was the security around that. In order to hide the personalization and make it secure as possible, it order to satisfy clients, we ended up having to design an adhesive strip that basically went all the way around the thing and almost made it impossible to open back up once they sealed it.
So we were actually able in the end to design a piece with Xerox that had a peel off adhesive strip that went right onto the enrollment form and provided enough security to satisfy our client and satisfy their compliance department and it was a very successful piece in the marketplace because their participants loved it as evidence by the use of the form in the marketplace.