Engaging the senses

People are sensory creatures. The five senses provide people with critical information throughout the day: pleasure, they allow people to assess situations in a flash, they provide feedback and warnings.

Anyone who is without one of these five senses is deprived to an extent, which cannot be imagined by those who have all of them functioning fully. Not to taste a great Merlot, to see a beautiful woman or work of art, to smell a rose, to feel the fur of a cat, to hear Beethoven. These are some of the things people take for granted every day, and to lose any of them is incalculable to those who have them.

They are also the five senses companies should be engaging, or trying to engage, when using transpromo to reach out to existing customers in a bid to encourage them to increase their business.

Transpromo, or transactional/promotional, as mentioned many times before in this Industry Insight series, is the use of existing communication to reach existing customers with current communication methods. Companies already send customers a monthly statement, at an inevitable or sunk cost. At a slightly increased cost, and through clever mechanisms, they can reach these customers with a highly customised or even personalised approach, which increases response rates by over 400% and drives up-selling and cross-selling.

To date, it has to be said, transpromo has engaged only one sense: the visual, through which people see. The other four senses need to be described in terms of what are termed sensory modalities:

* Auditory: Hearing
* Kinesthetic: Touching
* Olfactory: Smelling
* Gustatory: Tasting

So, is it possible to engage the other senses as companies reach out to existing customers in a drive to increase share of wallet?

Is it possible to engage the other senses as companies reach out to existing customers in a drive to increase share of wallet?

Konni Hoferichter is MD of LaserCom, a division of Bytes Technology Group.

At the most basic level, which is kinesthetic, the answer is yes. Mail envelopes can be produced in a type of paper that is more appealing to the touch than other papers. It can be recycled paper, a type of paper that is visually appealing, that clearly feels different, and that stimulates the emotional side of a person in that they feel they are making a difference environmentally. And this is a very clear and important consideration in today's world, where people can feel guilty if they impact the environment, happy if they feel they are making a positive contribution, and companies earn 'green points' through eco-friendly actions.

Can a person's olfactory sense be stimulated? Again, the answer is yes. Imagine simply applying a little promotional perfume onto an envelope at a point in the stuffing process. Another option would be to buy pre-perfumed paper and put that through the entire mail preparation process. This is not an outlandish consideration: just recently the Sunday Times inserted a male eau de cologne sachet in its entire print run.

And gustatory? Well, this could be done in a number of ways. As noted, magazines and other communications media have long understood the principle of inserting a sample in their wares. A teabag in a Fair Lady magazine; a little chocolate attached to a flyer at a traffic intersection are good examples. It might take a little more effort than this, but there is nothing to prevent a transpromo manager from inserting a sample of a promotional item in an envelope. It might be time-consuming and require manual intervention, but it would certainly stand out and catch a potential or existing customer's attention.

Now, compare the impact of a sensory intervention to a promotional SMS or e-mail. I challenge readers to find anyone, anywhere, who appreciates an unsolicited marketing SMS or e-mail. By their very nature they are and must be intrusive, and most people hate them (and don't even mention the promotional call where the first thing the call centre operator inquires is: “How are you?”)

As a final bonus, inserting samples as a transpromo exercise is far more cost-effective than inserting them in mass print media - and the response rate is likely to be far higher. Everybody knows the syndrome of newspaper shakeout, where readers tip all the inserts straight into the wastepaper receptacle. But they are far less likely to do that with personal communication that contains something of importance, that rewards readers for their actions, and that engages their attention for two or more minutes.