This year's annual report is all about building lasting customer relationships through relevant communications. We believe that is where our long-term growth and value creation opportunities lie. In 2011, we continued to make progress in executing our strategies to help our Small and Medium business and enterprise customers identify, develop and maintain the right relationships with their customers via the channels of their choice.
We believe that our disciplined implementation of our Strategic Transformation program, initiated in 2009, has laid the foundation for our future success. Our actions to increase productivity and streamline the organization have given us a more variable, competitive cost structure. The leverage from the program enabled us to improve our segment EBIT margins in three of our seven business segments for 2011 compared with the prior year, despite the prolonged global economic and business uncertainty that negatively affected our revenue. Most importantly, the benefits from these initiatives allowed us to reinvest in talent and infrastructure to expand our digital and hybrid capabilities in the customer communications management marketplace. We have made significant investments in our Web platform and customer-facing sales and service systems; developed global shared services across multiple functions; and enhanced our product management and development capabilities.
We made these investments and many others while still achieving net benefits from Strategic Transformation for 2011 in excess of $135 million. This brings the annualized run rate of our total net benefits to date to more than $300 million, exceeding even our most recent expectations of benefits targeted at $250 to $300 million. We will continue to realize benefits in 2012 and beyond from the capability that we have created. While we do not anticipate future material charges related to this program, we will drive continuous improvement in our operations as a way of life going forward.
Our revenue for the full year was $5.3 billion, a decline of less than 3 percent when compared with the prior year. Revenue this year included about a 2 percent benefit from currency translation. Adjusted earnings per diluted share from continuing operations were $2.70 compared with $2.23 for the prior year. Adjusted earnings per share from continuing operations included $0.44 per share related to tax settlements with the IRS for tax years 2001 through 2008.
Our earnings per diluted share on a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis were $3.05 for the full year compared with $1.41 for the prior year. This year's earnings included $0.52 per share for restructuring and asset impairments primarily associated with the company's Strategic Transformation initiatives; non-cash goodwill impairments of $0.56 per share; and a non-cash net tax charge of $0.02 per share primarily associated with out-of-the-money stock options that expired during the year. Benefits to GAAP earnings per share for the year included $0.13 per share from the sale of leveraged lease assets in Canada and an additional $1.31 per share net benefit in discontinued operations related to the tax settlements with the IRS in the U.S.
We continued to generate outstanding cash flow. Our free cash flow for the year was $1.03 billion, which benefited from higher net income, approximately $130 million in tax refunds primarily associated with U.S. income tax settlements, and higher reserve account deposits. Of our cash generated, we paid $300 million in dividends to common shareholders; made special contributions of $123 million to our U.S. pension plan; used $100 million to repurchase our common shares outstanding; and reduced debt by $50 million.
We are pleased that in February our Board of Directors decided to increase our dividend to $0.375 per common share for the first quarter of 2012. This marks the 30th consecutive year that we have increased our quarterly dividend. This is an important part of our commitment to provide excellent returns to shareholders.
We are expanding our opportunities for growing our value to shareholders and customers, as we successfully transform our ability to help our customers communicate and build lasting relationships with their customers. Our Strategic Transformation program has created the capacity to support and accelerate growth. We are focused on improving revenue trends in 2012 and have a number of initiatives designed to take advantage of opportunities to grow our digital and hybrid capabilities and offerings, while continuing to enrich our value proposition for all our customers.
Michael Monahan
Executive Vice President
and Chief Financial Officer