S Cuttlebutt
Is your glass-half full or is it half-empty? If you are surrounded by pessimists, then you must be having one hell of a time trying to maintain your positivity. With every day bringing more bad news about the global economy, entire countries’ economies going to the wall, and our own domestic fiscal woes, you can be forgiven for wondering if any of us has a future. But allow this negative stance to permeate your thinking and not only will you be living in abject misery, your work will suffer too. For once, let us all look for the light that is glowing at the end of the tunnel, the silver that is lining the cloud, the golden opportunity to encourage our customers to rekindle their faith too. Times are hard. No-one is going to argue with that. But times have been hard before, in fact, considerably harder than they are now. We’re here to tell the tale. We’ve survived worse than this. I have cornered our editor Miri and asked her to start looking for and reporting on the upside. There’s even a session at ECMOD Direct Commerce Show on just this topic— finding the upside in every business. It does exist, you know, and sometimes we can be just that little too close to the problem to see the solution that’s staring us in the face. So maybe response rates are struggling but your customers are still buying, simply perhaps buying a little less frequently or spending a little less now. Maybe some of your newest
product selections now seem to be a bit less of a dead cert; but others remain as popular and in as much demand as before. Maybe you can extend your range without having to commit to masses of new stock. Maybe you can find more economic and different channels to market. Maybe you can work to clear the warehouse of all that old stock that is costing you serious money to store and is depressing as anything every time you see it listed on the inventory schedules or have to walk past it. Someone, somewhere, will buy it and whatever you bank will be a bonus. Maybe you’re missing that one bright idea that will turn everything around. Maybe it is time you started to think as you would have done when you were just starting out, when you hadn’t reached critical mass or become just that little bit too complacent. I can introduce you to several great people who can come into your business and remind you of all the fantastic things you do in your business and which you could do more of. You could ask those same people what you should perhaps be sidelining, at least for the time being, and which channels you might be better advised
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This September we launched our new “Because Print Works” initiative. The campaign’s aim is to ensure that catalogues, inserts, print advertising and customer magazines get the full credit they deserve as vital components in the marketing mix for successful multichannel businesses. Happily, to coincide with the launch, August’s catalogue volume was the highest it’s been since we began writing the Catalogue Log. We received 87 catalogues in August 2011, compared with 61 catalogues in August 2010, and 71 catalogues in August 2009. The reason for this uplift? I’ve noticed that in August, cataloguers sent a sale catalogue and a new-season mailing. Lakeland, for example, mailed a gardening- themed sale catalogue and its 128-page Autumn book, a similar tactic was employed by The White Company and Museum Selection. Another strategy was to supplement a mailing with inserts in the national press or to send minicatalogues in product despatch. Also noteworthy was that even with the additional volume the sale and minicatalogues provided, 40 percent of all catalogue covers in August did not make any mention of a special offer. Compare that with July, when that figure
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to focus on. Sometimes we each simply have to find our sounding board and use it to bounce ideas around and find the best way forward. Now you can do all of this, you can find the right people, you can discover out what others have faced and overcome, as well as an awful lot more simply by investing a day or two at ECMOD. Use it as your annual health check, your injection of enthusiasm and inspiration, your inoculation against despondency. It really is efficacious in every way. Not only that, you could even win yourself a full delegate place by entering one of the competitions we’re running over the next few weeks in our Buzz and CataloguesCatalogues enewsletters. There’s also a prize of a full delegate place for ECMOD 2011. Send in your great tip or idea showing the pessimists—and those who have temporarily lost their way—how they can continue to grow their businesses on a very low budget and each one we publish wins. We’ll be printing these tips and ideas over our next few issues.
Tactics Views
S-cuttlebutt@catalog-biz.com
Send your tip or idea—100 words max—to
info@catalog-biz.com by 21st October. You’ll hear if you are one of our winners by 31st October. Remember, each tip we publish receives one delegate pass.
August Catalogue Log
M and M Direct, for example, set a £50 minimum order value, while charity catalogue Traidcraft only required customers to spend £15 to qualify for free delivery. At Prelude, the Scotts & Co/ Alexon catalogue, customers could enjoy free shipping if they order before 23rd September, a trick to encouraging an early influx of sales.
was just 31 percent. Of the catalogues that did promote a deal on their covers, a sale or discount was the most popular promotion; offered by 39 catalogues, or 44.8 percent. No prizes for guessing that the next most popular special offer was free delivery, now commonly teamed with free returns. Promoted on 18.4 percent of the covers we tracked, free shipping was marginally less popular in August than in July (21.9 percent) and appreciably less than in August 2010 (23 percent). To curb the costs of offering free delivery, many of the catalogues arriving in our offices offered it over a certain threshold—apparel catalogue
In contrast, free gifts were more popular in August than they had been in July. In fact, it was the highest figure we’ve noted since April. The offer was promoted on 14.9 percent of catalogue covers, predominantly by gardening and b-to-b mailers.
On a side note, we also received our first Christmas catalogues in August—from Findel’s 24Studio and N Brown’s The Brilliant Gift Shop. Interestingly, both these catalogues offer customers the choice to buy on credit. They mail early presumably to encourage customers to spread the cost over the next four months. Whether “cash-with-order” catalogues will follow suit with early mailings remains to be seen; as we all know, Christmas is getting later every year...
Miri Thomas, editor
miri@catalog-biz.com
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