A Chat with Arnie Zaslow, executive vice president, ATD American Co.

CS: How do you deal with increased postal rate increases?
AZ: At the risk of using a phrase that’s already been kicked around a lot, we’re trying to implement smarter mailings. In the early years, we operated on the premise that the more dung you threw at the wall, the more would stick. And the idea was that if you wanted more business, just mail more catalogs. And that essentially was true, because the cost of the catalog wasn’t so great as to have an overwhelming impact on the bottom line. Today the cost of producing and mailing a catalog is such that you want to increase that response rate. You don’t want most of your catalogs at the bottom of a wastebasket or marked non-deliverable. So we’ve used a lot of the software and technology available today to determine who our best prospects are. We’re mailing more frequently to customers, but narrowing down the prospecting field, which historically has always been a huge source of our catalogs. And today we mail far less prospects than we used to, and the prospects we do mail have a far better return than we did 20 years ago.