Do the Job Manually

In an era of computerization, it’s easy to imagine that all your competitors’ tasks are fully automated. Such a thought can make you, an individual cataloger, feel a bit embarrassed about your many manual tasks.

But no matter how many computers you buy, you’re still going to find yourself forced to manually perform certain tasks simply because cataloging comprises many activities with ever-changing components that resist computerization.

But manual tasks don’t mean inefficiency. One key to profitable cataloging is knowing how to perform manual tasks well.

“Congratulations! You’ve paralyzed every phone in the company!”

A national gift cataloger (that also has a nationwide chain of hundreds of retail mall outlets) devised the idea of helping out its mall dealers by mailing a catalog (personalized with the dealer’s name and address) to the dealer’s top 100 customers.

At this time, the cataloger invited each dealer to send a list of its top 100 customers with a submission deadline. The cataloger imagined receiving hundreds of e-mails, each with a nicely formatted mailing list attached.

But when the program manager reached her desk on deadline day, she found her company’s phone system paralyzed due to the hundreds of mall dealers simultaneously faxing their lists.

How was she going to turn this mess into a concise mailing list?

As a cataloger, you sometimes must mail a non-computerized list. Such lists can’t be ignored; they’re often productive, containing data pertinent to the customer, such as membership information from poorly funded local organizations, or raw sales data from a sales force that relies on personal contact rather than telemarketing.

In such cases, the trick is knowing which firms to turn to that manually will enter data from any format you give them, including piles of paper. These firms generally are efficient, often take last-minute jobs and can handle short runs without cost penalties.

In the case of the example above, the program manager gathered her many faxes, delivered them to a local data entry firm, and had a computerized list back of the data within a few days. Such a solution eliminates the need for temporary workers, volunteers or coworkers who need to stay late to finish the task. This is the best way to handle disorganized manual lists.

“Threaten to come back and do it for him. He’ll hate that.”

The cataloger was clearly at his wit’s end. “I need your help. I want you to call and threaten my data processing manager.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He won’t give me my year-end sales reports on time. I can’t wait any longer. I need them to plan next year’s circulation. Tell him I’ve hired you to come back and replace him. He’ll hate that.”

“I can’t threaten your data processing manager for you.”

“Sure you can. Tell him if he doesn’t give me the sales reports, you’ll come back and run them for him on his computer. That’ll light a fire under him.”

“Can’t you just wait a bit? How late are these reports?”

“Six months.”

“How can your reports possibly be six months late! They’re automated. The computer spits them out manually.”

“Yes, but the DP manager first has to go in and manually correct all the keycodes. It takes months.”

A little secret of automated catalog order systems is that the contents of the keycode field often are fiction. This is especially true for business-to-business catalogs. Catalog purchases commonly are made by those who may not have the catalog in their hands and therefore can’t report their mailing code to your phone operators.

Some catalogers react to this by trying to manually correct the keycodes before using the data to build circulation plans. They don’t do this on an order-by-order basis, which would be too unwieldy. Instead, they usually pull a keycode report, manually identify incorrect codes on the report, and then guess at what each wrong code “should have been.”

This isn’t as bad a system as it sounds. If the guessing is done by someone in your organization who is knowledgeable about the coding system and your customers, this kind of manual “fixing up” of your data can result in far more accurate sales-by-keycode reports. It also can result in more accurate sales-per-book and response rate numbers, and hence much more profitable circulation plans based on prior results.

Back-matching

But manually fixing these data can be a bruising task. In the case of the example above, the data processing manager successfully corrected the data, but it took months.

There’s a better way to do this. It won’t work every time, but it’s magic when it does. It’s called “back-matching.” The first step is to save all of your mailing lists. At the end of your season, send your order file to your data processing vendor and have it compare the names and addresses of everyone who purchased with the names and addresses of everyone you mailed. For each match, insert the proper mailing code from the mail file into your order file.

Essentially, you’re having the data processing vendor do what your operators should have done (but couldn’t or wouldn’t do) at order time by entering the customer’s proper mailing code.

Although this kind of back-matching usually is OK with rental list owners, check with them first to be sure. The required software is highly specialized since it must identify approximate rather than exact name and address matches, but the good thing is that this is the same software that data processing vendors already use for their routine merge/purge of mailing lists. Rather, this kind of back-matching doesn’t require vendors to purchase or perform anything new. And while your hit rates won’t be 100 percent, they’ll be high enough to significantly improve the accuracy of your sales-by-keycode reports.

Another way you can use back-matching is to connect your online sales with the catalog’s mailing code that drove the customer to order on your Web site. While it’s a fact that most online sales are generated by catalog mailings, it’s also true that many Web sites do a poor job of collecting mailing code data from that catalog. The result is mailing code sales reports that understate catalog sales and overstate online sales. Such back-matching also will help you build stronger circulation plans.

Susan J. McIntyre is president of McIntyre Direct, a full-service catalog agency and consulting firm based in Portland, Ore. She can be reached at (503) 286-1400.