A Synergistic Approach

Reiman Publications uses both catalogs and magazines to expertly serve its loyal base of rural consumers.

When the editors of Farm Wife News started producing T-shirts with slogans such as, “I’m proud to be a Farm Wife,” for their readers back in the early 1970s, they didn’t know that offshoot merchandise would launch a catalog business. A few years later, Country Store catalog was born, filling a niche in the rural marketplace.

Ann Kaiser, managing editor of Taste of Home and editor of Country Woman magazine, was with the company 34 years ago when the catalog concept first was developed at Reiman Publications. She recalls, “Merchandising began as byproducts of the magazines — items such as sweatshirts and T-shirts became so popular that the magazine started devoting a whole page to selling such items.”

Kaiser says that Reiman Publications’ founder Roy Reiman grew up on an Iowa farm and started Farm Wife News out of a need he saw in the marketplace. “As other big farming magazines were cutting out their women’s sections in an effort to trim pages, there was no place for farm women to turn for editorial,” she notes. “And the women were true partners in the running of farms and homes, and they needed a place to go for ideas. It was an advertising-free magazine, so the few product placements were a natural outgrowth of the publication.”

Over time, more product concepts (e.g., cookbooks, decorative porcelain plates) were dreamt up by the staff and sold well on the magazine’s pages. Kaiser recalls that the first few product placements included recipe cards, a baby minder chart, a booklet of kitchen tips from the magazine’s Food Fair column, and the famous T-shirts that Kaiser herself even modeled for the magazine. All were sold in a special section of the magazine called “Farm Wife Country Store.”

In July 1974, magazine executives ran a hot air balloon ride promotion for National Farm Woman’s Month. To coincide with the event, Reiman had T-shirts made that read “Look Up to Farm Wives.”

“The shirts were a big hit,” recalls Kaiser. “And that was the turning point, when the company recognized an opportunity for more merchandise sales and a possible solo catalog.”

Reiman founded the Country Store mail-order division in 1975. Eventually, the merchandising business took on a life of its own and was spun off into a stand-alone catalog.

Catalogs & Magazines: a Close Fit

At its founding, the Country Store was a way “to reach out to our rural subscribers with a market as near as your mailbox — and that was our slogan; it was a great fit,” says Kaiser. There remains a close working relationship between the catalog and the magazines Reiman publishes today, even though the business has grown and changed.

One major change came in 1986 when Farm Wife News became Country Woman magazine. Kaiser recalls, “We changed the name in response to a decline in the number of ranches and farms, and in an effort to open our readership to more subscribers beyond a purely farm base. It certainly was a big move and a bit of a risk, because we had built loyalty with our readers. But I think it paid off.”

Today, the definition of a country woman has changed a bit from the original subscribers. “More work off the farm today. But some [readers] are new to rural living, having left big cities and towns for a quieter life,” Kaiser adds.

Editorial still comes from the readers; their recipes and crafts drive the magazines, which now include 11 titles such as Taste of Home and Light & Tasty. And some of the content ends up sparking new catalog merchandising ideas. “There is ongoing dialogue between the kitchen people, the editorial side and the catalog,” Kaiser says. “We watch what they’re selling, and see if it’s something we should be covering in the editorial. We also continue to have a page that’s promotional product copy in the magazines, called the Country Store, specifically for the sale of catalog products. The magazine is used as a place to test products — especially food products in Taste of Home or Light & Tasty.”

Cross-marketing Opportunities

The base of subscribers to which Country Store could promote its products grew significantly in 2002 when Reader’s Digest bought Reiman Publications for $760 million, according to Phil Minix, senior vice president of catalog and tours marketing at Greendale, Wis.-based Reiman.

“The biggest asset we have as a cataloger is our free access to the Reiman Publications and Reader’s Digest databases,” says Jeff Stanislawski, director of marketing and analysis. “We take those names, send them to the catalog co-ops, and model them to see if they’re purchasing from catalogs in our categories: gifts, low-ticket housewares, apparel, etc.”

Country Store pulls 5 million to 6 million names from Reiman’s subscriber files each year and nets that down to a mailable quantity of about three-quarters of a million, according to Stanislawski’s calculations.

From the Reader’s Digest database, Country Store starts out with 7 million to 8 million names and ends up mailing 250,000 to 300,000. Minix explains that Country Store does the same sort of list processing with the Reader’s Digest database of names, but winds up taking the smaller cut of usable names. “We take fewer names to start, and also get a lower hit rate once they’ve been processed through Abacus or the other co-ops, which makes sense, because those subscribers are a little bit further away from our editorial mission.”

Minix continues, “After all of the modeling and selecting only the best names, we mail a million names a year from the subscriber file, out of the total 16 million pool [of both databases].”

Of course, adds Minix, everyone knows that magazine readers are not necessarily catalog buyers. “Here at Country Store, we’re fortunate to have that resource to go to. But to make the magazine lists effective, we have to model them using additional data from the catalog co-ops. That’s the only way we can make the magazine subscriber lists work effectively.”

In addition to working the company’s databases, Country Store uses cross-marketing to leverage the publications against the catalog, says Minix. “First, we have a page in the magazines — internally we call it a promo page.” As noted earlier, the magazines don’t take advertising and never have. “This promo page is where we can showcase and sell some of the products from the catalog. It has a headline announcing what type of products are featured, depending on the issue. The section is presented by Country Store and has the catalog’s logo,” Minix explains.

“Next, we run a supplement with every magazine that mails,” he notes. “The Taste of Home Product Guide,” for example, is polybagged with an issue of Taste of Home magazine and features offers for kitchen products. This program’s goal is to obtain a potential catalog buyer’s name. Once a buyer purchases an item from the supplement, Country Store will begin mailing him or her catalogs.

Unusual List Strategies

Country Store mails to prospects only in the fall because that’s when they get the best response, says Stanislawski. Prospect mailings in the spring were not particularly successful. He adds that, unlike most catalogers, Country Store tries to at least break even on its customer prospecting.

Says Minix, “We don’t prospect at a loss. We can afford to operate this way, because we’re a true partnership with our publishing arm. They don’t accept paid advertising. So we really do work together to operate a profitable business in this way. At the end of the day, they can add in value from our back end. We can’t lose money on getting that customer.”

As a result of this arrangement, Country Store places very tight marketing parameters on outside lists. “We ZIP model almost everything we’re going to mail,” Stanislawski says. That helps tighten the universe in terms of geographic regions that perform best for the catalog — typically the upper Midwest, the Plains, Ohio, Pennsylvania, western New York state and Missouri. The company makes use of several co-op databases. Stanislawski notes that where some catalogers have seen falloff with the co-ops, Country Store continues to experience success by using them.

Another strategy Country Store uses effectively with its best outside lists is cross-member optimization with the co-ops. Says Stanislawski, “This process occurs post-merge. We work with [other catalog] mailers to have their files at the co-op modeled. We provide the co-op our post-merge file. The co-op then adds unique names from the mailer’s file to our post-merge mailing file. This allows us to add prospecting names from our best-performing outside lists.”

One unusual list strategy working at Country Store is a housefile reactivation program that selectively mails housefile names that are as old as 92 months. By looking at recency, frequency and monetary data that typically pull from the old file a higher dollar level buyer and mostly multibuyers, Stanislawski says the catalog makes some pretty old names work. “This allows us to increase our mail quantities at times when we’d like to at very low additional cost,” he says.

Another strategy for outside list acquisition is the free gift offer. Minix says, “We’ll entice with a free subscription to Taste of Home magazine, a $19 value, as a catalog order free gift. No qualifier is needed for minimum order. Our catalog buyers love promotions like this, plus it gives us a new subscriber.”

Minix says they have to be careful not to extend this offer to anyone who already is a subscriber. “It’s really a great thing for both the catalog and for the magazines when we can profitably bring a new customer into the file from an outside source. Those new customers end up working very well for other channels here at Reiman.”

Country Store buyers tend to like special offers. Hence, both customers and prospects are sent special deals at different times in the buying cycle. “Free gifts, discounts, sales, shipping offers and percent-off offers work well for us,” Stanislawski says. “We have a stable of these offers that we rotate in and out.”

Most effective — as for almost all catalogers — is free or reduced rates on shipping. “We do some variations, such as a $2.99 flat rate, half-off shipping, free shipping with a $2 handling fee,” he notes. Moreover, the company has successfully tested a “Ship it for a buck” offer to outside lists, which has worked very well.

Most of the time shipping offers from Country Store are extended only to prospects, not to customers, Stanislawski says. Once customers come onto the housefile, Country Store reduces the number of special offers it sends them, including free shipping. The cataloger recognizes that it needn’t offer many incentives to pull in repeat purchases.

Merchandising Tactics

Minix notes, “We have a really distinct shtick: the general store that fits in your mailbox. To dilute it would risk losing our dedicated, tried-and-true loyal shoppers.” Who are Country Store’s buyers? Most are rural women, with an average age of 61 and an income that’s slightly lower than the national average. One way to get a good image of who these shoppers are, says Minix: 51 percent of the company’s orders still come in an envelope with a check.

Without straying from its core customers, Reiman has tried to grow the business as much as possible through other means, for example, by expanding its definition of country merchandise. Two senior buyers work with Minix to select all the catalog’s products. Some proprietary items, such as cookbooks and calendars, the company produces and prints itself. Most other merchandise is sourced through trade shows and vendors.

In selecting products, Minix says the challenge is staying true to the country theme while not growing stale. The kitchen category is the one area where there’s some latitude. “It doesn’t always have to have a country motif, since we now have four food [magazine] titles,” Minix says. “Sometimes we’ll private label a product if our test kitchen editors have used and put their stamp of approval on [it],” he adds.

One way Country Store has been able to sell more products in its most successful categories is by adding supplemental mini catalogs. Mailed only to buyers, the goal of these digest-sized books is to increase total spending by existing good customers. The mini catalogs — Country Store Garment Collection, Home/Bed & Bath, and Kitchen Products — mail in an envelope, or are polybagged with the product guide and magazine. Minix says production costs on these books is kept low by ganging print runs with other similar production runs.

New Catalog Launch

The limiting nature of the country concept actually has led to the impending launch of a new catalog. Says Minix, “There’s a limit to the size of the current business, even though we’ve been able to grow 20 percent on the top line in the past three years.” Still, he says, he’d like to accomplish two things with a new catalog: leverage the subscriber base more across Reiman and Reader’s Digest, and find a more broadly appealing merchandise concept.

The new title, Reader’s Digest American Made, is set to launch in March. “It won’t stray far from our current level of sophistication, nor will we carry really high price points,” says Minix. “But it will be a bit more broadly appealing than Country Store.”

The initial test will mail a million catalogs in March: half will go to Country Store [Reiman] names combined with Reader’s Digest names, and half will mail to outside lists.

With a slightly different audience expected, the offer strategy will be different for the new catalog. “With American Made, our goal is not to start it off with promotional shipping offers, but instead to just cast a very wide net,” Stanislawski says. The company plans to test about 50 lists, among them a smattering of home, outdoor, garment, gift, food, low- and high-ticket buyers. And then it will see where there are pockets of potential for future rollouts.

Says Stanislawski, “I’d also like to do a little outside-of-the box list testing by using some Republican party selects, some Southern state selects, perhaps some NASCAR and Evangelical selects. I think we need to test these sorts of things to see if there’s potential. My goal is to ultimately see a 2 million to 2.5 million-name universe that will break even or better.”

In terms of creative, Stanislawski says the key is achieving a balance. “American Made will celebrate products made in America. But I’m trying to make sure that in terms of catalog creative, every page is not wrapped in the flag. It doesn’t need to have red, white and blue on every spread of the catalog. That’s not what this is about.”

The in-house creative team responsible for Country Store catalog also is writing the copy for the new catalog. But an outside agency, CLI of Stevens Point, Wis., has been hired to do design and initial page layouts.

The new catalog will have its own Web site. Internally, Reiman plans to leverage the platform and back end of the Country Store Web site for construction of the new catalog Web site. But, Stanislawski says, to consumers, the two will appear as totally independent business entities. “We’ll use different fonts and graphics; they’ll each have their own look and feel, and of course, totally separate URLs.” Additionally, he notes, “I hope to collect more e-mail addresses from these customers, and grow the Web business [more than Country Store’s].”

He adds that American Made is branded under Reader’s Digest, so it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts its image. “We won’t connect the Country Store concept to it,” Minix notes. However, he adds, the company does plan to test a cover with the Reiman name just to see what the impact of the branding might be.”

The target market is middle America, not just the country or rural markets, says Minix, clarifying the difference between the new catalog and Country Store. But he has worked with Country Store’s existing vendors to find and source products for the new catalog launch, noting, “They’ve been great at helping us locate products and price points that will work for the new catalog.”

With Country Store’s unique history, wherein a few standout products launched a catalog business, it’ll be interesting to watch what items make their mark with its new sister catalog’s audience. Perhaps as with the “I’m proud to be a Farm Wife” T-shirts from the 1970s, another great merchandising concept may emerge to help spur Reader’s Digest American Made to become a thriving catalog business.

About Reiman Publications/Country Store Catalog

Headquarters: Greendale, Wis.
Parent company: Reader’s Digest
Merchandise: country-oriented collectibles, kitchen items, books, apparel and home accessories
# of employees (Reiman): 500
Annual catalog circ.: 10 million
# catalog mailings per year: 12
# product SKUs: 4,500 total (600 items per catalog)
Sales from Web: 15 percent
Catalog creative: in-house creative services group, including photography
Newest catalog: Reader’s Digest American Made
Printer: Quad Graphics

Reiman Publications’ Lists

Housefile: 700,000 12-month catalog buyers
List manager: Direct Media, (203) 532-1000

Alicia Orr Suman is a freelance writer specializing in direct and catalog marketing. You can reach her at aorrsuman@aol.com.