Innovative Marketing To Online Billpay Customers

New York, June 2008 (www.AllpayNews.com) - Striata, a leading international provider of ground-breaking eBilling applications, revealed today that their innovative electronic messaging solutions help create dramatic new marketing opportunities to reach customers who use online bill payment portals. These bill payment websites have become an expected fixture in the banking, mortgage, cable and telecommunications industries, and play a vital role in their overall strategy to reduce costs – especially those expenses associated with paper statements and billing.

Garin Toren, Chief Operating Officer for Striata North America, explains. "While a successful online payment portal can help facilitate paper turn off and reduce billing costs, it can also mean losing out on personalized marketing opportunities. Traditionally, customers receive bill inserts or "stuffers" incorporating marketing offers into the same envelope as their paper bills and statements. In most cases this marketing opportunity is lost when a customer opts to view and pay their bill online."

"For services industries where a significant amount of revenue is generated from customer retention programs, this can add up to a sizeable lost opportunity. Striata adds considerable value with automated messaging solutions that replace envelope inserts with bill payment confirmation emails incorporating personalized marketing offers."

Integrating personalized, targeted marketing into payment confirmation emails
Striata's technology addresses the marketing challenges of online bill payment portals by turning simple, plain text payment confirmation emails into a significant revenue generating marketing channel. While there are many more "touch points" to Striata's push eBilling process, the customization of a company's existing payment confirmation emails can be completed in a matter of weeks, providing a unique opportunity to market to customers who pay online.

Functionality that Striata uses to deliver encrypted eBills to customer's inboxes is used to "push" rich payment confirmation emails to consumers. Unlike marketing offers presented on a website, payment confirmation emails can be uniquely customized to include relevant, targeted and personalized marketing offers.

According to Mia Papanicolaou, Head of Striata eMarketing, incorporating marketing offers within payment confirmation emails is particularly effective as it is directed at recipients who are expecting and willing to receive the email. Customers paying online expect a payment confirmation email, so billers are ultimately targeting an expressly interested audience.

Significantly more cost effective than the traditional paper bill stuffer, this particular form of email marketing has proven to be an invaluable tool for many industries including insurance, cable and telecommunications, banks and lending services.

"Unlike paper based offers, billers can accurately track which offers were clicked on, when, how many times, and by which customers. This type of detailed tracking and reporting facilitates intelligent, revenue-based marketing decisions derived from measurable customer behavior," says Papanicolaou.

All commercial emails can be personalized according to customer demographics or other business drivers and marketing criteria. Striata's advanced profiling engine enables clients to include pertinent offers based on demographic (age, gender), psychographic (income bracket, purchase activity) and usage information, such as current product and service usage, length of service and billing address, as well as customer enquiry behavior.

For more information about the marketing opportunities in online bill pay, driving customer adoption and paper turn off strategies, visit www.striata.com.

About Striata
Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets that deliver a rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and an enhanced customer experience.

Striata revolutionizes the way bills, statements, policies, collection notices, letters, paystubs and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid. Registration requirements are eliminated by emailing feature rich, interactive, encrypted documents directly to the inbox and enabling innovative 1-click electronic payment from within the document itself.

Direct email delivery of bills and statements dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic documents, paper turn off and ePayments. This enables Striata's clients to achieve rapid ROI, to complement their existing self-service and e-communication strategies, to significantly reduce paper output and to meet their carbon footprint / environmental impact targets.

As a leading international provider of electronic messaging since 1999 with more than 200 blue chip customers, Striata has operations in New York, London, Sydney, Johannesburg and partners in North, Central & South America, Europe and Asia Pacific.