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Category: Insurance

Elevate Your Postcard Campaign with Specialty Print Effects

Elevate Your Postcard Campaign with Specialty Print Effects

Elevate Your Postcard Campaign with Specialty Print Effects

Postcards can be a powerful, direct marketing tool, but standing out in a crowded mailbox requires more than just great design. Adding specialty print effects to your postcards can transform your direct mail campaign into a high-end, tactile experience that converts.

Preferred Direct offers a variety of specialty print finishes that can add a premium feel to your direct mail postcard campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of the options available to enhance your next print campaign.

Metallic Inks – The Budget-Friendly Option to Foiling

Metallic inks contain reflective particles that mimic the look of foil without the need for expensive substrates or foil stamping methods.

These shimmering inks can enhance your premium postcard campaigns, providing an upscale, polished look. We suggest pairing metallic inks with rich, jewel-toned colors like navy, burgundy or black. It helps the metallic effect POP off the background and creates a more luxury feel.

Design inspiration:

  • High-end product promotions (jewelry, luxury fashion, automotive)
  • Elegant event invitations or VIP offers
  • Exclusive club memberships and premium service announcements

 

Fluorescent Inks – A Bright Way to Catch Attention

Fluorescent inks are formulated with specialized pigments, which absorb and emit UV light to provide a glowing, neon effect.

We suggest using these inks sparingly to draw the viewers’ eyes to important information or call-to-actions (CTA’s). These bright colors are especially useful for sales advertisements or limited time offers and can give the appearance of a personalized, hand-written postcard.

Design inspiration:

  • Limited-edition or limited time offers for dealerships and realtors
  • High-end fitness or beauty brands with a vibrant, energetic brand voice
  • Informational finance and legal postcards for clients

 

Tactile Coatings – A Touch of Luxury

Tactile coatings provide a textured finish to a print surface, such as soft touch coatings, grit coatings, matte varnish, embossing, and more. The most popular option is soft-touch, which creates a velvety feel across the postcard.

Add this as a flood coating to stand out immediately when recipients handle their mail pieces or add as a spot coating to draw attention to details like car leather.

special effects printing

Design inspiration:

  • Luxury fashion, cosmetics, and high-end electronics
  • Premium real estate listings
  • Special event invitations

 

 

Specialty Coatings – Add Contrast and Shine

Specialty coatings are used to give visual interest to printed pieces. Popular choices include high-gloss and matte, used alone or together to create visual depth in high contrast designs.

Our favorite approach to specialty coating is giving rich, vibrant images a boost with gloss coatings and create a striking contrast with a super matte coating in non-image areas. This will add a sheen over key visuals to grab attention, while leaving the key text areas easy to read.

Design inspiration:

  • Premium travel and hospitality promotions
  • Upscale real estate and interior design showcases
  • Gourmet food and beverage branding

 

A successful direct mail campaign starts with reaching your audience, but the real success lies in capturing their attention and inspiring action. Specialty print effects are a great way to add memorable details that elevate your postcards and improve your campaign ROI. Preferred Direct is proud to have recently installed a new HP Digital Press capable of running high-end, specialty printing inks and coatings for your next luxury campaign. Contact our team today for expert advice on your next campaign and explore our specialty print and postcard options.

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How to Increase Billing ROI with Transpromo Marketing

How to Increase Billing ROI with Transpromo Marketing

What is Transpromo Marketing?

Transpromo marketing, short for “transactional-promotional” marketing, is the practice of merging transactional documents (like bills, invoices, or account statements) with promotional content. These documents are already being sent to customers as part of regular businesstranspromo marketing example operations, making them a cost-effective channel for adding marketing messages. When done strategically, using billing documents as a dual-purpose tool to both inform customers and drive revenue has massive potential to increase ROI.

Transform Billing into a Revenue Driver

By combining billing with carefully crafted promotional content, businesses can transform routine mailings into a powerful marketing tool. For example, a billing statement could include a promotion for a new referral program, or a utility bill might highlight discounts for energy-efficient lighting and power cords.

By integrating advertisements, cross-sell offers, or informative content into billing documents, you leverage the high open and read rates of transactional mail. Viewers are more likely to open a bill, than they are to open unknown promotional mail.

The key lies in personalizing these promotions. Using customer data and variable data printing (VDP), businesses can tailor the message, piece by piece, to align with the recipient’s known needs, demographics or habits.

transpromo bill printing

Why Does Transpromo Work?

Transactional documents boast some of the highest engagement rates in the direct mail space. Customers are known to likely to open, review, and retain them. Incorporating promotional content into these documents helps your message reach a highly attentive audience.

Additionally, this approach eliminates the need to send separate promotional mailers, reducing marketing costs while maximizing impact. This dual-purpose format is especially effective for financial institutions, business and home services, universities, utilities, healthcare providers, and subscription-based services.


 

How Preferred Direct Marketing Maximizes Transpromo Potential

Preferred Direct Marketing specializes in creating customized financial documents that seamlessly combine essential transactional information with eye-catching promotional content. With expertise in secure data management, advanced printing techniques, and integrated direct mail strategies, PDM ensures that every piece of transpromo material delivers measurable results.

Leveraging financial documents as a marketing channel is a low-cost, high-impact way for businesses to reach their customers. Utilizing personalization techniques such as variable data printing can help boost billing ROI by connecting essential customer information with promotional messages that resonate with their needs.

Contact PDM today to get started with your own transpromo marketing campaign and see the ROI for yourself!

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Maximizing Open Enrollment Success: 6 Key Print Materials Every Insurer Needs

Maximizing Open Enrollment Success: 6 Key Print Materials Every Insurer Needs

Maximizing Open Enrollment Success: 6 Key Print Materials Every Insurer Needs

insurance marketing

Open enrollment is a crucial time for insurance companies to attract new members and retain existing ones. In the competitive marketplace, print insurance marketing remains a tried-and-true strategy for communicating your benefits and value to potential policyholders. In this blog, we’ll explore six essential insurance print materials to maximize open enrollment success and elevate member experience.

Direct Mail Open Enrollment:

Direct mail marketing remains a powerful tool for reaching new members and reminding existing ones during open enrollment. Postcards, mailers, letters, and advertisements come in all shapes and sizes and can be used to send personalized messages, promotions, renewals, and important information about insurance plans. Direct mail allows potential policyholders the time to review and research your offerings, directly or online. With Preferred Direct’s experience and technology in direct mail services, we’ll help you create eye-catching designs with a strong call to action and targeted audience to increase your campaign ROI.

Printed Newsletters:

open enrollment direct mailCreating a printed newsletter, with professional finishing such as saddle stitch binding, will certainly leave an impression. This print insurance marketing approach not only caters to a diverse demographic, including those who may prefer traditional communication methods but also makes it more likely to be noticed and retained. Including member benefit summaries, featured doctor and hospital news, and even a nutritional cooking recipe, can help create an engaging newsletter that establishes a tangible connection with your audience, encouraging policy enrollment and retention.

Third Party Billing:

Third-party billing can provide a seamless process for collecting premiums, deductibles, and communicating coverage details. These documents should be designed with the utmost clarity to ensure that policyholders can easily understand their financial responsibilities. Preferred Direct is a HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-certified printer, excelling in high-quality third-party billing services. We take pride in making sure your customers have a smooth experience during open enrollment and billing because we know happy customers can equal lifetime policyholders.

Explanation of Benefits:

Explanation of Benefits (EOB) statements are essential for policyholders, providing a breakdown of the costs associated with their services. Just like third party billing, having a professional and concise EOB document and communication process will improve your member experience making them more likely to renew each year.

Member Handbooks:

Member handbooks are valuable tools for insurance companies seeking to provide their policyholders with comprehensive information about their coverage. These handbooks serve

book printing services fulfillment

as a go-to resource for policyholders, offering details on benefits, claims procedures, network providers, and other essential information. A well-structured member handbook can be a valuable asset for both policyholders and insurance companies during open enrollment, fostering trust and confidence in your services. With state-of-the-art printing and finishing technology, Preferred Direct can create a professionally printed and bound resource that strategically covers all your insurance offerings.

 

Document Printing:

During open enrollment, insurers have a multitude of documents to print, ranging from member forms, contracts, and more. Preferred Direct offers state-of-the-art document printing services that guarantee accuracy, consistency, and professionalism. Your insurance company can rely on us to produce high-quality insurance marketing print materials that reflect your commitment to providing excellent service.

PDM teamPreferred Direct has over 35 years of experience as a second-generation family business working with insurance providers throughout the US. In our experience working with some of the largest insurance companies in the nation, to maximize success during open enrollment, it’s essential to invest in the right print materials. By incorporating third-party billing, direct mail marketing, advertising postcards, explanation of benefits, and document printing into your open enrollment strategy, you can create a comprehensive and compelling marketing campaign. These materials not only convey essential information but also reflect the professionalism and trustworthiness of your insurance company and its services.

For a successful open enrollment season, trust Preferred Direct as your full-service business communication partner. Contact us today to discuss our marketing and design services to help you goals this enrollment season.

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Remaining HIPAA Compliant with Third Party Printers

Remaining HIPAA Compliant with Third Party Printers

Remaining HIPAA Compliant with Third Party Printers

Are you truly HIPAA compliant? Maybe you’ve set up certain measures of data security and protected your processes internally, but what about your third-party vendors? As a HIPAA compliant and HITRUST certified printer, Preferred Direct invests in quality equipment and proven processes to ensure printing projects for healthcare, insurance, finance and other data sensitive industries comply with HIPAA requirements. From securing sensitive digital files to choosing the right third-party vendors, we put together a quick list of ways to ensure your organization remains in compliance.

The 3 HIPPA Rules

Before getting started with HIPAA compliance, we first need to understand the three HIPAA rules which all compliance best practices build upon:

HIPAA Privacy Rule

HIPAA HITRUST compliance

The HIPAA Privacy Rule establishes a federal standard for safeguarding the privacy of individuals’ personal medical records and other identifiable health information.

HIPAA Security Rule

The HIPAA Security Rule establishes a federal standard for safeguarding electronically stored personal medical information of individuals to ensure the privacy, confidentiality, and security of these records are maintained.

HIPAA Breach Notification Rule

A HIPAA data breach is defined as an individuals’ protected health information (PHI) being disclosed or used without permission that compromises the security and privacy of the information in any way.

Once the breach is discovered, the organization has 60 days to notify the individuals whose information was exposed and submit a report to the Department of Health & Human Services. If the breach exposes over 500 individuals’ PHI, the organization must also notify a notable local media outlet.

Technology Security

With technology becoming more advanced, it’s important your organization takes the necessary precautions to prevent data leaks or PHI breaches. Digital ways to secure access to sensitive data is encryption, creating secure access portals, and managing user roles/admin levels. Physical ways to protect this information include computers automatically log out when not in use and personal logins for all employees. For facilities with portable devices, conducting device inventory checks frequently could prevent these devices from leaving the premises without permission.

Ensure your outsourced print & mail vendor also maintains secure access, provides secure file transfer options, and encrypts all data transferred. As a HIPAA compliant and HITRUST certified print and mail vendor, Preferred Direct offers healthcare customers individual client logins for secure FTP file transfers and encrypts all print and mail data.

Facility Security

You can’t protect devices with secure data access or PHI records, without having a secure facility around it. Ways to prohibit unauthorized access to protected health records is having alarmed security systems throughout the building, storing records and files in authorized personnel only areas, and tracking devices with ePHI access. Knowing who is coming in and out of your facility at all times makes it easy to identify a potential breach point if a data leak does occur.

Training

An often overlooked practice of securing PHIs is training staff and faculty. Having quarterly or annual HIPAA compliance training keeps experienced staff up to date and gives new hires HIPAA compliance best practices. Holding training sessions on staff security, ethics, integrity, data breaches, and more will empower employees to speak up if they see malpractice occurring and remind them of the proper protocols when handling sensitive data.

Audits & Compliance

HIPAA compliance audit

It’s important to complete the proper audits annually. Completing risk assessments, policy reviews, contingency plans, and vendor audits will ensure your organization remains HIPAA compliant. Allowing protocols or policies to “slip through the cracks” is where HIPAA compliance is more likely to be compromised.

Also, be sure to audit your third party print vendors and other outsourced organizations. Requesting information on their security protocols, testing for vulnerabilities, and having policy conversations with your vendors will help prevent a third-party data breach.

Print Security

HIPAA compliance also applies to your outsourced commercial printer. When it comes to choosing your third-party vendors, it’s important they also take the necessary precautions when printing and distributing sensitive data. One way to remain compliant when printing protected medical records is by using HIPAA compliant print vendors with secure data transfer portals, HITRUST certified common security framework, and secure digital and inkjet VDP technology – choose Preferred Direct.

Preferred Direct MarketingAs a HIPAA compliant and HITRUST certified printer, Preferred Direct has invested in top print and fulfillment technology and follows the strictest data security standards to ensure the safety of your data. If you’re looking to get one step closer to ultimate HIPAA compliance, contact Preferred Direct for third-party medical bill printing and mailing services. See for yourself why Preferred Direct is the trusted health industry print partner – contact us to get started on your next print project today!

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Do you know your Explanation of Benefits Mailing Requirements?

Do you know your Explanation of Benefits Mailing Requirements?

Do you know your Explanation of Benefits Mailing Requirements?

Health insurance companies provide EOB’s or Explanation of Benefits statements after individuals receive their health care services. Given that individuals’ health information is deemed sensitive and protected under HIPAA, it’s crucial to understand EOB requirements.

The Explanation of Benefits Statement

To have a better understanding of EOBs, it is important to note that at first glance, an Explanation of Benefits statement closely resembles a medical bill. The EOB usually says at the top “This is Not a Bill”; however, it may look like the recipient owes money.

EOB forms give details about a specific medical insurance claim that was processed by the insurer. It explains how much of the insurance claim was paid by the insurance company and how much is outstanding, based upon the costs of the care provided and the individual’s health insurance plan.

To illustrate with an example, consider an allergy screening. The allergist charges a set fee for service, and a health insurer pays a certain amount of that, which is dictated by the individual policy, deductible amounts, and other variables. Individuals usually pay a co-pay at the time of appointment but may owe more money later once the insurer processes the claim if there’s a difference in the service cost and what the insurer will cover.

In addition to details about the specific procedure, the Explanation of Benefits forms usually contains policy-specific information, which adds context. After summarizing the recent claim, the EOB form will usually summarize the deductibles and any other out-of-pocket claims for the year.

This way, the insured can better understand what they owe by reviewing how much of their deductible they’ve already paid. While EOBs explain medical billing information to the insured, they can be challenging to understand, and errors can happen. Many patients need to call their insurer to ask targeted questions, so they can better understand both the EOB form and any subsequent medical bills that arrive.

EOBs generally come after any medical or dental service is provided. Dental EOBs are similar to medical EOBs in form and function and have the same requirements. However, since dental insurance is limited in its coverage, patients who need extensive dental procedures may owe far more than they would for medical care.

EOB Mailing Requirements

While some patients choose to view their Explanation of Benefits online, many patients are reluctant to view sensitive information online and would prefer to receive a hard copy by mail.

Our Statement Generation or print on demand services make it simple to create and mail personalized EOB statements to users as the need arises. HIPAA’s privacy rule affects statement generation and EOB mailing requirements. HIPAA mandates that an individual’s health conditions, demographic information, services received, and payment for services be kept confidential.

Thus, any medical information, including adolescent children, that mentions the past, present, or future health care information (including fees for services rendered) must respect the privacy rule regardless of how the data is transmitted (via direct mail or electronically).

Given that your medical organization must comply with HIPAA, any direct mail or electronic service you work with must have a thorough understanding of HIPAA and its privacy laws, and be able to send out confidential medical information in an appropriate manner. Knowing your EOBs is important. Preferred Direct complies with all HIPPA requirements.

An insurer cannot be held liable if a patient’s confidential information is disclosed when all proper measures are taken. However, if an insurer does not take proper steps to preserve the integrity of private information, and they are found to be negligent, they will face fines that range from $100 to $50,000 for every violation.

Digital communication companies, like Preferred Direct, provide insurers with a range of medical statements, including EOBs, medical bills, plan benefits, and other healthcare forms, electronically or hard copies. While healthcare marketing materials may not have any private patient information, thus be exempt from HIPAA.  An individual’s sensitive medical forms must have their confidentiality protected.

Sending EOB Statements

Preferred Direct is a knowledgeable partner for insurers who want to outsource their billing to a third party who can provide fast, accurate, and confidential statement generation or electronic communication services. Since digital communication companies specialize in printing and sending campaigns, hard copies, or electronically, they can do it efficiently.

Outsourcing this service also saves time while allowing employees to focus on mission-critical tasks. Patients enjoy receiving accurate materials promptly.   Preferred Direct’s communication services generally accept health data in a variety of formats, including .csv, .xls, or .txt. Digital communication companies using the supplied data will generate an accurate Explanation of Benefits statement.

Preferred Direct also offers e-billing services, in which medical bills and EOB statements can be generated and electronically transmitted to patient online portals or emailed, streamlining the EOB mail process for insurers.

Since forms must be addressed to individual patients, look for a direct mail shop that offers variable data printing, in which patients’ names and other unique data can be included in the mailings for customized, meaningful communication.

To ensure security and confidentiality protection, insist upon a direct mail provider that has a HITRUST and HIPPA certification, which is the most common security framework for healthcare data in the U.S.

Preferred Direct has HITRUST certification and keeps up to date with all HIPAA requirements so that we can serve our insurance industry customers.

Not only are we attentive to the healthcare industry requirements, but we also offer highly efficient direct mail services. Since we use match mailing and postage automation services, we can efficiently process and send an Explanation of Benefits statement to their members while saving the customer money.

We create and maintain customized printing products for our customers, and we update our in-house stock with measures for inventory control. This way, we’re always ready for your next mailing. Whether you’re looking to outsource all of your medical statements or only need help with EOB mailing, we can take care of everything quickly and accurately.

Conclusion

Eye glasses witting on top of a Medical Billing statementWhen you are dealing with Explanation of Benefits you must be certain that all HIPPA rules are met.  Be especially careful with any and all information relative to the person, and that information should be treated with the utmost confidentiality.

There are savings to be had by outsourcing the EOB statements to a competent print and mail production house.

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