A-Listers

By Carolyn Heinze

In recent years, managers and brokers have been playing a larger role in catalogers' success.

List brokers and managers have been offering value-added consulting services to catalogers for several years. But as competition intensifies and catalogers' budgets continue to tighten, list firms have had to step up to the plate to give mailers more services than ever before.

Help for Smaller Catalogers

Take, for example, Garrett Wade Co. The seller of high-end woodworking tools and accessories signed on with Millard Group last fall, and its senior vice president, Pete Segal, notes that Millard offers a more hands-on approach than other services he's used before. "It's as much of a consultative role as it is in just the mechanics of supplying lists," he says. "The list business has changed quite a bit, and database companies like Abacus have come in. That is where a lot of companies, including ourselves, are getting the bulk of their prospecting names."

Prior to working with Millard, Garrett Wade's list management and brokerage was divided between two brokers. Segal concluded that while the list reps were performing well enough, there was more that could be done. "We needed to turn to someone who could act in a more complete consultative role and bring both parts of the equation to one firm," he recalls. With the same firm now handling the renting out of its housefile and the renting in of prospect files, "they can see both sides of the equation and act more effectively in helping us to build our list."

List pros' expanded resources are particularly appealing to small to mid-sized catalogers such as Garrett Wade, which aren't large enough to have this specialized help on staff, Segal notes. "List brokers, in principle, should have their fingers more on the pulse of what's going on in the marketplace than I could have as a relatively small mailer," he says. "We don't have a full department of people who are thinking about these issues all the time. That's where a well-rounded list service type of company can be leveraged to our advantage."

Along with providing useful marketing advice, Segal says his list firm now is "able to give us good guidance — and that has increased our lists' value and the company's profitability."

From the list firm's perspective, Linda McAleer, executive vice president at Millard, points out that the knowledge base among list pros is so broad "that tapping into us as a resource benefits [catalogers], even if they're not leaner in terms of marketing staff," she says. "One cataloger has a narrow view of what's going on out there. We have a wide view, in terms of cataloging, publishing and fundraising, across all niches. To bring us in is advantageous to them."

Eric States, president of After 5, a bar accessories catalog, and Surf to Summit, a seller of kayak and outdoor gear, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., has become an avid user of his list firm's value-added services, which begin with suggested mailing times and key dates, and services related to compiled databases. "They give me a lot of guidance on modeling our lists based on our demographics," he explains.

But he cautions that the advice better be good. "If list brokers provide that extra service, they need to create and cultivate long relationships," he says. "If they make bad suggestions, we don't come back to them, the lists don't work and a lot of money's wasted. When you're with the right people you can get a lot of information out of them that will help you grow faster."

More Than Just List Services

Other list firms sensing increased demands from clients, such as Belardi/Ostroy ALC, also have become more aggressive in offering non-list services. A couple of years ago, Belardi/Ostroy implemented a Growth Strategies Group to expand its service roster into other areas of marketing for its clients. "We really are working as a pure consultancy in that regard, and that's been very instrumental in bringing new clients into the fold as well as enabling us to work on projects that really have very little — or nothing — to do with traditional list management and list brokerage," explains Chairman and Chief Executive Andy Ostroy. "We've become much more of a multichannel marketing partner, transcending the traditional list broker/manager relationships to really become much more involved with our clients as businesses holistically. We look at the clients' business[es] from top to bottom in order to help them, across channels, with their marketing, circulation and promotional strategies to both grow their databases and grow their businesses."

Ostroy believes this evolution is a natural extension of the conventional list business. "Our core competency has traditionally been mailing lists," he says. "But if you start to get out and consult with clients beyond that, there is still a nucleus of lists that is at the heart of a lot of the strategies that we're working with them on. Not to say that it's one-stop shopping — I don't buy into that, and I don't think that's the motivator for clients. There is an ease of adding another layer to an existing successful foundation if that layer is related and is a natural extension of the core services. That's very appealing to clients."

Along with conventional list management and brokerage, Millard offers circulation planning, lifetime value analysis, merge/purge processing techniques, e-mail marketing, partnership marketing between catalogers and publishers, and cooperative databases.

"We're going to become much more [than] consultants outside of the database world. We've gotten involved in relationship marketing — bringing companies together. This is what we do in the list world, but it goes beyond that," McAleer explains, citing the company's Alternative Media Division.

"Even if companies shift their dynamics from popping catalogs into the mail to marketing over the Internet, once you buy, there's always a package. Some of our clients are at the point where, without us, they don't want to make major moves; we have become such an integral part of the business," she adds.

This services expansion transcends the virtual world and the traditional mailing environment. "We look at any aspect of the postal environment as well as our clients' online marketing strategies," Ostroy says. "We work online on both platform as well as promotional affiliates, such as search engine optimization and marketing. On the direct mail side, we really look at the mailing strategies inside out, and how they are approaching their clients, be it from contact strategies to cross-channel promotional strategies. It's a whole soup-to-nuts [kind] of marketing, rather than just a focus on the list side of things."

From both the list pro's and cataloger's viewpoints, moving beyond traditional list management and brokerage is a necessity, as Ostroy points out. "For us, it's the future," he says. "That's not to say it's the future at the expense of what has been our traditional list management and list brokerage services, but more so a successful outgrowth of those services."

Carolyn Heinze is a freelance writer and editor. She can be reached via e-mail at carolyn@carolynheinze.com.