Best Tips From Direct Media Co-op
The 34th annual Direct Media Client Conference and Co-op held last week in White Plains, N.Y., offered attendees some timely perspective on how catalogers are approaching, and trying to survive, an uncertain economy.
Ed Mallin, president of infoUSA’s Services Group, seemed to sum up the theme of the conference best when he said the shift to the digital world is “the most dramatic shift … and it’s not going away.” Mailers need to acknowledge and understand how the Web is changing their businesses, and adapt to the new realities of the Web world.
Below are the most noteworthy takeaway pointers from the event:
* Reggie Brady, a Catalog Success columnist and president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions, a direct and e-mail marketing consultancy, spoke on the power of abandoned shopping cart e-mails as a solid revenue stream that every cataloger should be capitalizing on. She provided numerous examples of major merchants benefiting from using abandoned shopping cart e-mails.
* The catalog luncheon focused on e-mail marketing and the trend for smart catalogers to use more frequent e-mails as a major revenue stream. Weekly e-mails have become the norm for most catalogers. In fact, nobody seemed to scoff at some catalogers e-mailing almost on a daily basis.
* Co-mailing opportunities were recognized by many catalogers as the lone bright light in the face of paper and postage price increases. While it’s not realistic to squeeze the post office, paper mills or your printer for cost savings, co-mail pools offered by printers are yielding savings of up to 3 cents per catalog mailed and are the one ray of sunshine in a world of increasing paper and postage costs.
* infoUSA created a lot of excitement with the state-of-the-art capabilities of its Yesmail e-mail marketing potential. Its system offers not only a robust relational database, but the ability to find those customers who respond to your e-mails. And thus the ability to mail only those customers. The ability to eliminate those customers who aren’t responsive to your e-mails is a major step forward in managing the customer experience.
* Kevin Aronin, chairman and CEO of PlasmaNet Inc., provided a gloomy assessment in his keynote speech of the short-term prospects for marketing to the American consumer. However, he advised American companies to look outside America’s borders and be nimble enough to find opportunities around the world.
A completely nonscientific poll of whether mailers were cutting back circulation or seeing response rates trend downward seemed to indicate that most mailers weren’t seeing an overall downward business trend, although certainly some mailers have seen some individual mailings underperform, especially when in-home dates coincided with negative news about the economy.
Jim Coogan is president of Catalog Marketing Economics, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based consulting firm focused on catalog circulation planning. You can reach him at (505) 986-9902 or jcoogan@earthlink.net.
