Tailoring Directly to Their Customers: A Chat With Sue & Robert Prenner

CS: What have you done to deal with the increased postal rates?

SP: I didn’t do anything about it this year at all, other than tighten my belt in other areas. I didn’t change my mailing plan dramatically. We did some really dramatic changes in the last five years. We really didn’t know what else to do beyond what we’d already done (adjusted our page count, changed the size of the catalog, changed the quality of the paper, changed the number of prospecting lists we use). We’ve done all that. So obviously we’re still critically looking at prospect lists and re-examining all the databases. All that aside, the only thing we think is really going to make a difference, and we also tried the spin-off catalogs as a way of having intensity of particular areas that are strengths for us rather than having it all in one catalog, but I think that the main focus this year has been to try to push a lot of material to the Web. Really try to improve our position on the Web. We’re finding a very substantial number of orders are coming from the Web site, and that is going to be the answer to some of the postage issues, but not all of them. It can’t be. Because everybody who orders on the Web in quantity is ordering with a catalog in front of them. It’s really painful and it just keeps getting more painful.