Reduce Your Direct Selling Expenses
16 Actionable Tips
What can you do to reduce your selling-expense-to-sales ratio? One way is to increase revenue without spending more money … easier said than done. Another way is to reduce your direct selling expenses. Following are a few suggestions to consider:
1. Use square-inch analysis to plan your page count. Be careful not to over-circulate pages. For consumer catalogers, the page count should vary depending on the season (i.e., holiday vs. summer). Circulating too many pages will increase your costs, because the productivity of those extra pages may not be enough to offset the additional cost.
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.
