Printer Talk

With the latest postal rate increase weighing heavily on catalogers’ bottom lines, you’ll be needing advice on how to mail more efficiently. While list brokers can offer considerable guidance on which lists to rent, printers are another key source for money-saving tips.

Naturally, the issue du jour is the May postal rate hike. Printing company officials say that the postal situation has given them a chance to collaborate more with their catalog clients. Now more than ever, printers are giving catalogers input on co-mailing, customization, paper selection, trim size, and even list hygiene and database management.

“I’ve never seen so much conversation and reaction,” Rick Dethloff, vice president of purchasing for Menomonee Falls, Wis.-based Arandell Corp., says of the hubbub caused by this year’s postal rate increase.

Don Landis, Arandell’s vice president of postal affairs, agrees, and says that during past postage increases, he would just tell catalogers how much their postage was increasing. “This one has almost the entire plant involved,” he says. “We’re looking at different scenarios as far as size, basis paper weights and addressing list hygiene are concerned. We’re running the whole gamut of trying to lessen the impact of this rate hike.”

Back to Basics

To mail more efficiently, start at the very basic level by cleaning up your list, says Claire Ho, a spokesperson for Sussex, Wis.-based Quad/Graphics.

Bruce Jensen, vice president of the catalog and magazine group for Montreal-based Transcontinental Printing, notes that catalogers have to understand who they’re mailing. “Make sure your catalogs are getting to the right people with the right products,” he says. “Go back and refine your lists to ensure your lists are clean and up-to-date. Make sure they’ve been through the national change of address (NCOA) system — the merge/purge part of it.”

Landis points out that database management has become an important service offered by printers in recent years. He suggests looking closely at the files of requesters who haven’t ordered. “How long do you keep mailing before you give up?” he asks.

Dave Blais, senior vice president of sales and administration at Quad/Graphics, says analysis of catalog lists also is critical, noting that you should “look at your database through some different lenses and different points of view to see who’s really in that database.”

Improved database technology also should be used more frequently to customize catalogs to drive up response rates. “We still have catalogers who are carpet bombing,” he says. “They’re literally sending out the exact same catalog to millions of people. Not everybody on that list is going to respond to the generic catalog.”

Printers like Quad have the ability to customize any number of pages on a single copy level, Blais notes. Catalogers can create special sections for customers based on their buying history. “If you put that into a mass catalog,” he says, “you have the best of both worlds.”

Business-to-business catalogers were the early adopters of customization, Blais notes, because they could track purchases, such as a piece of office equipment, and anticipate that the client would need supplies for the equipment from subsequent catalogs. “But I’m seeing consumer marketers are also definitely heading in this,” he says.

Personalized Prospecting

Jensen says Transcontinental offers technology that personalizes catalogs “in a lot of places that you couldn’t normally do.” This also can be helpful for prospecting, allowing catalogers to send a smaller, but still personalized book to a prospect.

Continue to keep an open dialogue with printers when it comes to lowering basis weights on paper to save money on postal costs. But there’s a chance it may not work for you. Some catalogers already have dropped as low as they can.

At Arandell, a company that works with many brand-conscious clients, Dethloff says few catalog customers have changed their paper. “If anything, they might change an 80 lb book on the cover to a 70 lb,” he notes, adding that most of Arandell’s catalog clients use 50 lb coated freesheet for their pages.

Dethloff also suggests interweaving — using some lower basis weight pages inside, possibly on clearance pages — but few Arandell clients have taken advantage of that.

More catalogers are working with their printers to mix basis weights to some degree within the pages. “It’s become a little more common,” Blais says, adding that they might step down slightly for pages in the center.

One of the hottest topics of discussion lately between catalogers and printers has been changing formats from standard down to digest or slim jims. Size and format are areas in which there has been a lot of recent “one-on-one with the customer to come up with a solution,” Landis says. But some mailers are hesitant to change the size of their catalogs because they fear a reduction in response rates.

John Patneau, executive vice president of catalog sales at Montreal-based Quebecor World, calls format changes and paper reductions “tactical approaches” that the company has been doing for awhile. But there’s apparently more interest than ever before.

Calling any changes Quebecor makes a balancing act, he says that the challenge for his customers is that, “They’ve created their brand. The catalog represents their brand, and now they need to change it to accommodate a cost situation imposed upon them.”

Co-mailing Increases

Sometimes printers can convince catalogers to try a reduction in trim size, even a small one, because it means they may be able to significantly cut postal costs through co-mailing. “We do a lot of co-mailing, but we anticipate a lot of growth and have augmented our services in that area,” Blais says. “That group didn’t exist five years ago.”

He says that Quad has paired up large clients who mail very high density with smaller mailers. “We’ve created a strategy that allows those large mailers to benefit as well.”

Landis says Arandell’s co-mailing department also has grown. “We take a look at our system and see these catalogers have similar in-home dates. So then I marry them up,” he says. “Now they’re saying co-mail me anytime.”

Likewise, Jensen says his catalog clients are hitting him up for more help with co-mailing. “Co-mailing is the hot word out there now.” But he adds that a printer also must point out the risks as well as the savings to catalogers, particularly if delivery dates get pushed back as a result.

One thing printers hope catalogers won’t do is have a knee-jerk reaction to the postage increase and cut back on circulation without fully researching the pros and cons. “That will hurt everybody,” Landis notes. “There are solutions out there. Let’s talk about it.”

* * * For more tips, click on “Pointers From the Pros: Printers Offer Their Tips for Mailing Smarter” under Related Content.

Gail Kalinoski is a freelance writer based in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. You can reach her at gkalinoski@aol.com.