Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

At the risk of stating the obvious:

You'll need to present this new protocol as being of TREMENDOUS advantage to your customer.

Were this happening within my organization, I would pull together a meet of all parties that even TOUCH on this issue, even if it's a guy that works on the loading dock. Get them ALL to come up with advantages.

As a strategy, I have seated people in a circle, put all their names in a basket and drawn a name for who goes first... The winner starts off by setting forth an advantage (the most obvious, of course), the next person in the circle must come up with a NEW advantage, and so on. Small circle? Go around twice (or three times) till the responses become absolutely inane.

Pick the best of these, build some bullet points and put the word out to your customers.

YES ! DEFINITELY use the time between now and the date of the increase to let your customers know it is coming ! SELL it !

Thank you for your answer. It's more the wording I am after, bit your points have been taken on board. Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

I'm assuming that your competition already implements this fee as part of doing business with them. If not, unless you're clearly the best transport company, you may be giving people a reason to look at the competition.

Besides the difference between being hand-written and computer-generated, I'm not understanding why the new notes will fall off the freight less often.

The benefit you'll be advertising is "getting the freight sent faster and more accurately".

Getting into this a little deeper:

You haven't stated whether the new protocol being offered as an OPTION or if you're REQUIRING your customers to UPGRADE.

Your original post implies TWO positions:

"TRYING to get customers off..." "...prefer..."

"...increase is not until..."

Even if they use the old protocol, they will be charged?

Why not just spell it out to them, just like you've done it here (with some editorial work)? You have a buisiness problem that you have to solve, and it involves--as happens all the time--a small surcharge per printed consignment note. However, that charge can be avoided by going digital. There might be other advantages to doing that (I don't know, things like it makes tracking easier or something) that you can throw in the pot.

Don't overthink this. Don't try to spin it. If people are going to be mad about the extra charge, they're going to be doubly mad if you try to BS them.

Maybe a letter to all customers, from your CEO, explaining things is the right approach. Use it as invoice stuffers or wherever you'll be sure to reach people.

July is around the corner. You might even want to institute the policy in July, and then waive the fee for 30 days and offer some specific help to customers learning how to submit con notes online.

Thank you so much for all your input so far. You all have valid points and I appreciate your help so far. I will leave this opened a few more days to see if I get any more comments.
In the meantime I will start drafting something. I may post it so see want you all think.
Thanks again for taking the time to help.

Also other competition do not implement this fee (i am sure they will over time) we are the first. I think this is why I am so worried to let everyone know about the increase hence why I am stressing about the wording.
The computer generated con notes have better adhesive but more offer than not freight that gets lost is written on the older style which as you can imagine some peoples writing is impossible to read, have incorrect postcodes etc which makes the freight get mis directed which in turn can get lost. I don't think I could word that correctly to make to customers not feel like they are dumb.