Past, present, future the changing face of direct selling
Andrew Wilson, independent direct commerce consultant
September at the very latest. Your Christmas peak came in late September and you took 28 days to deliver the goods, which was the reason the Christmas peak came so early. The customer needed the time to return the goods and get a replacement before the last posting day for Christmas.
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You recruited customers by buying cold lists or placing advertisements in the case of two-stage companies. You sourced your products from the far east during the previous autumn and from the US and European shows in January and February.
If you were any good at all your response rates were fabulous and you were pretty much guaranteed to make money on all your recruitment mailings. I used to budget four to six percent response on acquisitions, two percent was failure. My best was a stonking 13 percent from a list called “Country Garden”. (Great list, dreadful business. Never made any money and even the turnaround specialists J D Williams couldn’t make it work when they bought it.)
That was about it really. Throw in a bit of catalogue design and post-campaign analysis and that was the job done.
Compared to today it was something of an easy life but somehow we managed to fill our time.
Here was our task list: - • Source and select product • Arrange photography, copy and catalogue design • Select from house file • Source cold lists • Select mailing house • Devise promotion and get letters written • Carry out some PR • Rarely (for most companies) do a little conventional advertising
• Mail • Stand back and wait for cash • Analyse results
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hen I started in the mail order business life was pretty simple. If you had a gift catalogue you mailed it once a year, probably in July. Early
A task list today looks somewhat different All the above plus : - • Update website • Optimise for search • Arrange ppc campaign • Update affiliates • Shoot video and upload to YouTube • Devise email campaign • Run social media campaign • Run online PR campaigns • Run online advertising campaigns (and decide whether to join in with that effective abomination persistent advertising)
• Study analytics after orders start coming in to improve performance
• Remerchandise based on analytics results • Coordinate activities across channels • Update all online activities based on customer response
The list above is by no means comprehensive. Even so, the number of tasks has more than doubled, most of the increase coming in the last ten years. In order to carry these out marketing departments have probably doubled in size too, but I don’t think our businesses have. You just have to do all this stuff because, well, everybody else does and we live in a competitive world. Modern consumers expects to have the facility to order from whichever channel they wish when they wish and communicate with their chosen vendors how they wish. And if you don’t offer the facility then someone else, hungrier and more acquisitive, will.
Whilst there are obviously more tasks to carry out, the real difference is that in catalogue-only days, once the mailing was done that was it. You couldn’t do anything about how customers responded once the catalogue was in the mail, you were just a witness at an accident. These days you are an active participant who can change the outcome.
You can constantly tinker with websites and online. Consumers provide you with a stream of information that tells you what you are doing right and wrong so you can tweak your site’s or campaign’s performance almost on a daily basis. This has changed our thinking somewhat. We live much more in the
ecmod DIRECT COMMERCE YEAR BOOK 2011
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