Reduce Your Direct Selling Expenses
9. Re-use photography. You can change the cropping to make the photos look different. Avoid costly re-shoots of the same item.
10. Eliminate residual mail. After the postage qualification has been run, eliminate the residual mail. These catalogs mail at the highest rate.
11. Purge your file. When you’re doing a merge/purge, don’t pass more names than you need to. You’ll want to go a year (or two) beyond the last year you normally mail. But, for every record you pass, there’s a charge from your service bureau regardless of whether you’re mailing that name or not.
Steve Lett graduated from Indiana University in 1970 and immediately began his 50-year career in Direct Marketing; mainly catalogs.
Steve spent the first 25 years of his career in executive level positions at both consumer and business-to-business companies. The next 25 years have been with Lett Direct, Inc., the company Steve founded in early 1995. Lett Direct, Inc., is a catalog and internet consulting firm specializing in circulation planning, plan execution, analysis and digital marketing (Google Premier Partner).
Steve has served on the Ethics Committee of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and on a number of company boards, both public and private. He served on the Board of the ACMA. He has been the subject of two Harvard Business School case studies. He is the author of a book, Strategic Catalog Marketing. Steve is a past Chairman of both the Catalog Council and Business Mail Council of the DMA. He spent a few years teaching Direct Marketing at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
You can contact Steve at stevelett@lettdirect.com.
