The premise is simple: The man in the street will spend more time gazing at his credit card bill or any kind of printed statement about what he owes than he will with a piece of direct mail. The statistics back this up. And the bill is going to be looked at at least seven times before somebody gets round to paying it. The direct mail by contrast is heading for the bin within seconds of being picked up from the mat. Herein lies the dilemma and the opportunity. Direct mail can only work if the envelope is opened, so why not put the marketing message where it is sure to be read – alongside details of the amount spent last month. Welcome to the world of transpromo, a word contrived by the collision of transactional and promotional printing. And according to the experts it is going to be very big.

That is certainly the hope at GI Direct which has installed the first Screen TruePressJet 520 inkjet presses in the UK. In fact it has two of them working in a sealed room at its plant in Leicester. On one side are the conventional 24pp Zirkon web presses, on the other the Delphax lines which have been the presses carrying out lasering duties where personalisation has been needed. These print in black only so are used for overprinting or for lettering duties. By contrast the Screen presses print in glorious colour.

Together black and white digital and conventional litho print, albeit with all kinds of special folding, cutting and gluing to deliver highly entertaining must-play-with promotional pieces, have taken the privately owned business to sales of £27 million. Its continuing rate of growth should take it to £30 million when this financial year ends in March, but in order to reach its target of £50 million by 2010 GI Direct is going to need another string to the bow.

And this is coming too at a time when financial services companies were already pulling in their horns in terms of direct mail spending ahead of any credit squeeze, when consumer unease about direct mail is high and when government too is looking at how best to reduce its perceived heavy environmental footprint.

GI Direct has tackled the latter, having eight years experience of ISO 14001 coupled with FSC Chain of Custody certification. But it can do little about the financial squeeze which has seen abrupt changes in the sector. SR Communications went into administration and was sold; K2 has been merged with DSI-CMM. The belief is that neither company had made the changes to respond to different market conditions.

This is not something that can be levelled at GI Direct. It has been conscious of the changes in the market for some time, and is constantly looking around for options. “We can’t be a me too producer in this market place,” says sales director Patrick Headley. The company’s track record underlines this. It has continued to expand its services since being established in 1992 as Graphic Inline by Ron Welch, who had earlier founded Colorgraphic. The business is now headed by his son Robin Welch, a graduate of Watford College in the early 1980s. A team of six directors are the shareholders in the business, ploughing back profits into the operation. The £3 million of cash generated last year has paved the way for the new venture.

GI Solutions was started in 1996 to handle outsourced services and GI Insite as a data management operation followed on. It also has a facility in China to offer low cost print to its clients such as the millions of coupons supermarkets give shoppers to collect for schools. In 2002 Project X began the search for another revenue stream, sales director Patrick Headley explains. “We started talking to clients about where their marketing was going and how it would change, whether they would accept the quality of the solutions like the Versamark that were then on offer,” he says.

Then at Ipex in 2006, the company came across the Screen inkjet press. Realising its potential, GI Direct began pressing Screen to supply it. There was a lot of pressing before the two duplex lines were delivered in November last year. Both are fitted with Hunkeler reel handling equipment and sheeters. One is configured as a straight machine running four colours on both sides of the web, the other is positioned in an L shape to run as two simplex machines over preprinted reels or as a duplex machine – terminology in this market sector being influenced by the computer companies that have traditionally dominated high volume transactional print.

As word got out that GI Direct was in the market it came under pressure from other suppliers. Xerox, for example was looking for a company to take on its cold fusion colour machine. Headley explains that GI Direct resisted such moves. “We felt the Xerox wasn’t available,” he says, “and we didn’t want to be paying a click charge.”

The company has also had to boost its security levels, adding ISO 27001 to its other certifications, and will shortly add Apacs to this. It will be able to handle invoices and any coupons or cheques that have monetary value to be sent through the post. Hence the mailing area to accompany the presses is situated directly above the machines in a secure room where the £600,000 spent on mailing lines offer selective enclosing to support print personalisation.

The initial idea had been to start slowly and to build as the company got used to the presses and any niggles were ironed out. On the latter front it knew it was dealing with a reliable machine having visited Japan where according to Headley “nobody had a bad word to say about it”. It has been put through its paces doing sample work and running on jobs that might normally go through the Delphax while the company waits to convert a mezzanine floor into a secure envelope enclosing area, happening in the next few weeks. Likewise the Hunkeler equipment is renowned for its reliability, leaving only the interfacing issues to be sorted out.

Meantime Headley continues to spread the word about the benefits of transpromotional print. “It is about white space management,” he starts. “Instead of lots of white paper on the bill, why not populate this with sales messages? The cost per page is only twice that of black and white print, because the ink coverage is quite low, but the sales opportunity more than covers the cost of the mail pack.”

Adding a sales message has been proven to work in Japan where the world’s greatest concentration of Xerox iGen3s churns out millions of credit card statements each month dotted with paid-for adverts. This model has yet to take over the more reticent European market, or even the US where intrusion into the grief of dealing with what was spent last month could be more acceptable.

However, it may be that the financial arguments win out, especially when companies are faced with steepling postal rates and need to cut back on the number of mailings overall. There is also the advantage of using colour to improve navigation around what is termed ‘debt paper’ so that a recipient cannot easily fall back on the excuse that ‘I didn’t understand what I was looking at’.

The first sector that will fall to this new type of printing will be the preprinted reel. There is already a huge degree of wastage in the transactional sector because the terms and conditions printed on the reverse of the invoice change frequently. Equally one finance provider may be supplying a number of retailers with branded cards or handling the hp arrangements on their behalf and digital printing provides a way of managing the brand communication with the customer, increasing affinity and therefore the likelihood of a further sale.

For the large retailers that GI Direct works for, digital colour printing as known until now is not up to the job. Headley accepts that response rates are very much higher from highly personalised pieces produced on HP Indigos or iGen3s, but the cost is prohibitive. “The returns look good, but there is not enough sales value from a 15% return on a 20,000 print run to make it worthwhile for large retailers. We’ve needed something to offer a higher running speed than the iGen3 type equipment and better quality than the continuous inkjet machines.”

The quality from the drop on demand technology used in the TruePressJet is certainly good enough to be acceptable for GI Direct’s customers. Costs too are right. The issues are now cultural rather than technical and here Headley is convinced that the market is swinging in the right direction. “The future is about maximising your customer communications; it’s about ways to drive footfall into stores and it still has to be relevant; but if you are sending somebody a bill, why not use that opportunity to cross sell?”