The employment of transactional documents such as bills and statements as an advertising medium is already a tentative reality. Such advertising – christened with the recently coined jargon word of ‘transpromo’ – is yet quite rare in the UK, with major brands proving slow to capitalise on the digital print technology that enable them to utilise this white space opportunity.

Somewhat surprisingly, up to now professionalinsert and list management companies have not been heavily involved in the transpromo revolution. It is likely they have been forced to hold back because of missing capabilities, activity and experience in the UK. For the medium to really take off, all the professional media and list management companies, that for many years have managed insert programmes in the transactional envelope, will have to extend this activity to advertising insertions on other transactional communications, including both digital and postal communications.

The technology innovations in variable data printing have caused analyst to predict that there will be a fully fledged explosion in transpromo activity. The expected escalation in transpromo advertising on bills and statements has convinced many marketers who deal with a large online customer base to start contemplating alternative media for the delivery of third party advertising.

Each e-commerce transaction is followed by the delivery of an order confirmation by email.

Whether consumers scrutinise these order confirmations or even print them out and file them is of great marketing importance. Should this be the case, then the ‘eyeball’ time commanded by online order confirmations would make them into a very powerful medium for introducing affinity third party advertising. Pioneering forays into this kind of ‘new’ advertising medium have tended to call such advertising ‘Digital Inserts’, a term more readily recognised and understood by the media buying marketplace.

In order to evaluate the possible advertising potential of e-commerce order confirmations, Response One commissioned research aimed at understand opening rates for email and online order confirmations, as well as subsequent print out frequencies across Britain. They in fact found that 82% of UK consumers open and check their order confirmation nine times in every ten.

The ‘impact’ of this advertising opportunity is greatly extended when consumers also print out the order confirmation for filing and maybe for further reference. This study therefore asked British consumers about their propensity to print and found that fully two fifths of the population declared that they printed out their order confirmation after making a purchase for future reference.

The research exercise also specifically asked respondents whether they felt they were likely to click through on adverts inserted into their order confirmations, and indeed whether it would be acceptable for that advertising to come, not from the company they purchased from but from associated third parties. The results confirmed that around half of all consumers would seriously consider clicking through, whether the advertising derived from the same company or from affinity partners.

Whilst these findings confirm the potential advertising power of online order confirmations, two words of caution should be spent. First, third party advertisers cannot be accepted indiscriminately; they need to be appropriate and relevant to the recipient. Secondly, the web experience that a consumer encounters when they do click through remains absolutely critical to the conversion of response into actual sales.

Online order confirmations present an exciting new opportunity for the issuers of those confirmations to leverage this customer contact, and for third party companies to gain access to an additional touchpoint with consumers offering powerful open rates and high attention levels. Digital inserts therefore, could lead the way to the spread and rise of transpromo and affinity marketing opportunities.

Response One Group