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Soft Touch UV Coating

Posted on January 27, 2012

A little softness can be the perfect look for your catalog design!!!!!

Now available at Arandell is soft Touch UV. It can be applied in either a spot or flood application.

In a spot application, it could be used to emphasis a texture on your cover. 

The soft touch is a unique UV finish that delivers the feel and appearance of velvet on your project.

You CAN Judge a Catalog by its Cover…

Posted on January 20, 2012

With the temperature dropping and snow covering the ground, we are lucky if we even make it outside to get the mail on a daily basis.  And when you do, chances are you are scurrying back inside, throwing it on the table, and attempting to warm up.  In this stack of Holiday credit card bills and thank-you notes is your company’s catalog…but is your customer really seeing it, or is it getting lost in the pile?

An easy way to catch the eye of your customer is by amping up your cover appeal.  It is universally known that the cover page is the most important one of a catalog.  An enticing or strong cover could mean the difference between the customer placing an order or using the paper to fuel the fireplace.

There is a simple acronym – REDD – to keep in mind when deciding on your cover page.

  • Relevance – Who is your customer and do you understand them?
  • Emotion –The most difficult part of the strategy, this takes careful planning and evaluation of your customer. 
  • Drama – Grab your customer’s attention the second their hands are on your catalog and they won’t want to put it down.
  • Differentiation – What makes your catalog stand out from the others?  Don’t copy your competitors.Even though customers spend the least amount of time looking at the cover, it will be the image that stands out in their mind, if these tools are put to use.  A memorable cover could be what makes your company stand out from the rest.

    • Managing Promotional Offers and Finding the Equilibrium

    Posted on January 06, 2012

    Since the recession, catalogers have come to rely more and more on promotional offers to drive sales. And catalog and internet buyers have come to expect strong promotional offers and seem to wait for offers before they make a purchase.

    Managing promotional offers and making sure they are well balanced within your catalog circulation, your e-mails and your on line ads is a critical part of getting your marketing mix right.

    Do you need deeply discounted offers to get customers to buy? Deep offers have two big negatives; First, you have the margin hit of giving deep discounts. Second, you train the customers to wait for the big offer because they know the deep discount coupon is coming. One alternative is to wean your customers away from waiting for the big offer by giving them a series of much smaller discounts so that they learn to expect frequent but not such dramatic discounts.

    Will customers buy at full retail? Not if you’ve trained them to expect discounts. I’m a big customer at Borders and now wait for the discount coupon because I buy so frequently their is always a discount coupon in my mail box. And now that I’m a “platinum” member and get an extra 10% off, I really am torn about buying at a regular bookstore because now I’ve come to expect 33% and 10% off on every purchase at Borders. I even buy the Sunday New York Times there to save $2.00. But the upside to Borders of the continuous stream of e-mail coupons is that I’m loyal to their discounted prices. Note that Borders did file for bankruptcy this month.

    Can you send more frequent e-mails to your buyers who have responded to e-mails? One of the big trends that is emerging is that smart marketers are segmenting out the buyers who have responded to e-mail offers and are sending them more frequent e-mails than to their entire file of e-mail addresses. You can ramp up greatly the frequency of e-mailing coupons and promotional codes to those customers who have responded to them in the past—a discount buyer is a discount buyer. I’ve also noticed, going back to my Borders example, that as soon as I use a Borders coupon I get an immediate series of fresh coupons over the next one to two weeks.

    So you should segment out responders to your promotional offers and hit them up frequently with more offers and even set up a separate stream of e-mails to buyer’s right after they have made a purchase. It is an old truth in direct marketing that people are happiest with you right after they have purchased something. So right after they buy is the best time to ask them to buy again!

    Should each catalog have an offer? If you’ve trained your customers that you give them frequent offers, then you run the risk if you send them a catalog without an offer that your response will suffer.

    Do you have the same risk with behavioral targeted ads? Probably much less so, because the ads are going out to your web site traffic which is a mix of previous buyers and non-buyers rather than to your own buyers. So the ads are being broadcast to a different population. So with on line ads you can test ads with and without an offer.

    What about giving offers to your entire e-mail list? How can you limit the risk? One technique is to broadcast strong offers to your e-mail list that hasn’t made a purchase in over a year. These people are essentially dormant, so it can be worth your while to reactivate them using a strong e-mail offer.

    So here are some rules to consider to help manage your multichannel promotional offers:

  • Don’t favor one channel over another with stronger offers through e-mail than through your catalog.
  • Try to limit how deeply you discount. It’s better to run shallow discounts frequently rather than deeper discount infrequently.
  • Segment out those customers who have responded to your promotional offers and consider increasing the frequency of offers to those buyers and sending fewer discount offers to those buyers who have never used a promotional offer.
  • Consider using promotional offers either via e-mail or your catalog to reactivate customers who haven’t bought from you in a long time or to e-mail subscribers who have never bought from you.
  • Know that when you send shopping cart abandon e-mails that customers are expecting a promotional offer.
  • Test constantly. Test the difference between deep offers and smaller discounts for catalog offers, e-mail offers and on-line ad offers.
  • If you are selling commodity branded merchandise, know “street price” of the items you are selling and be very careful about selling either above or below the established “street prices” for an item. If your price is above, you won’t sell much and if your price is below the established market price, you may get pushback from your manufacturers.
  • Have a pricing and promotional strategy so you are not just reacting with discounts to make your monthly budgeted sales.
  • Consider modeling your promotional buyers versus your full price buyers at the coop databases to see if they are different types of customers.
  • Accept that promotions are increasingly a fact of life and you may have to sell most or all of your merchandise using some promotional offer.

    • Measuring the impact of mailing a household multiple times during the same season

    Posted on December 19, 2011

    When you are up against the need to maximize both sales and profitability in Q4, you should be sure to have some tests and metrics in place to measure the impact of mailing the same name multiple times.

  • Know your sales curve for each drop so that you don’t over allocate “unknowns to the last drop before Christmas.  Just knowing the sales curve for the various drops from looking at your key codes will let you allocate those post-Thanksgiving “unknown” key codes properly.
  • Test the sales revenue of mailing a prospect or marginal house name a single time versus two or three times.  After you have the sales revenue top line number, be sure to get to the profitability by subtracting the catalog cost of a second or third mailing to the same prospect.  You want to avoid having more revenue versus less profits from multiple mailings to the same household.
  • Having too many drops in Q4 can be more expensive and harder to read results.  Having multiple drops has some hard costs; each time you are in a co-mail pool you have to pay the printer a hefty administrative and processing cost of several hundred dollars.  And, if you break up your mailings into multiple drops, you may lose co-mail postage savings (even though the printer will tell you this will never happen, you may get bumped to the smaller mail pools) and you face the risk of a mail pool being delayed so your in home dates may fall on top of each other.
  • Mailers may seek to find unique prospecting names by pulling balance models.  This strategy can work but it can backfire.  Balance names are mailed later in the season and often miss the sweet spot of the best in home dates for the holiday season.  Mailers should build the biggest, best coop database models in the initial merge (so taking just “new” names or just “previous” names is usually a mistake.
  • You should make sure you take the various coop models, put them in the merge and correctly segment them as overlap names that are multis between two or more coops and coop singles.  Coop overlap multis can often be mailed twice in a single season and these names are the best names.  Overlap names almost always outperform coop singles.
  • Make sure you don’t segment one coop’s singles only and try to compare those results against another coop that combines their singles with the coop multis combined together.  You aren’t comparing apples to apples.  You can check this by looking at the gross-to-net percentage in the merge or by comparing the number of singles as a percentage of the total number of names in the various coop segments.
  • Make sure you can back out of your matchback results all the sales that result from late season e-mails.  That credit should go to the e-mails and often matchback results credit those e-mail sales back to the last catalog mailings in a season.

    • The key way to preserve your profitability is to know how many prospects are being mailed multiple times and the catalog cost of those second and third mailings compared to the incremental revenue being generated.  Profits get pretty skinny when you are mailing two or three or four catalogs to get incremental prospecting revenue.

    The coops have good optimization models that you can use to only mail the “best-of-the-best” prospecting names and to score older multibuyers and these optimization models should be part of cataloger’s circulation plans.  If you are taking a large portion of your circulation from a single coop, use another coop’s optimization model to score your prospecting file.

    Catalog Printing Trends – High-quality

    Posted on December 12, 2011

    It used to be that most mail order catalogs were printed on cheap, drab newsprint. Not anymore — the most successful mail order companies are opting for high-quality 100-pound gloss text pages and even experimenting with 70-pound matte stock for a softer, more personal glow. Also, in an effort to identify with environmentally conscious customers, many companies are also printing their mail-order catalogs on recycled paper.

    The mail-order catalogs remain as strong as ever, and it’s easy to see why the world’s biggest companies are employing mail-order marketing strategies to complement online campaigns. They’ve learned that the easiest way to make sales online is for the customer to know exactly what they want — and where to find it — before they even log on.

    Arandell is already viewed as a leader in print quality. That quality can be seen on the printed page but what pushes Arandell above is everything that happens beyond that printed page. At Arandell, we do more. Contact us today to learn more. Click Here

    USPS Update – 12/8/11 Webinar

    Posted on December 08, 2011

    The USPS announced in September, 2011 the possibility of closing over 250 processing facilities. Just how will the closures and network realignment affect catalogers?

    Presenter: Don Landis – Vice President of Postal and Government Affairs

    Don Landis will review and explain the latest information from the USPS and what catalogers need to be aware of i.e, service standards, print schedules, etc.

    Don Landis is responsible for Arandell’s postal policies and mail marketing strategy development. He uses his knowledge of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to educate clients about USPS products and services and about how to implement those products and services into their marketing strategies.

    Catalog Printing Trends – Supersize It

    Posted on December 07, 2011

    Today’s businesses and consumers get a lot of mail, which is why it’s so important to immediately stand out from the crowd. Instead of a traditional Digest or Slim Jim catalog, try a larger trim size catalog and see if you get a better return. Chances are you will, because your customers will instantly recognize that your company is offering something special, something big and will want to open your catalog for a closer look.

    To to learn more about different strategies, contact us. Let’s talk so we can learn and understand your needs (deep dive if you will), your business, and challenges – then we can develop a solution that specifically addresses these and follows through with measurement and review. At Arandell, we go beyond the printed page.

    Integrated Marketing Efforts

    Posted on December 01, 2011

    The flood of online shoppers doesn’t mean that there’s no market for mail-order catalogs. In fact, many companies that started online have shifted their marketing efforts into the print arena for its high return on investment. Good print campaigns earn a response rate between 3 percent to 5 percent, compared to .05 percent to 1 percent for the typical online campaign. Plus, your print catalog is a great way to get more people to your online catalog; just as the online environment is a great place to find leads to mail your print catalog to.

    Successful mail-order catalogs take on many faces, but there are some noticeable recent trends that seem to pay off better than others.

    A way to improve you ROI is by integrating your marketing efforts. Continue to print and mail but also explore mobile apps. To learn more about mobile apps, click here.

    Catalog Growth

    Posted on November 17, 2011

    Since the mid-1990s, many experts have predicted the extinction of the printed catalog. However, until the double-whammy of the huge postage increase of 2007 and the Great Recession of 2008-2009, catalogs in America continued to thrive, aided and enhanced by the maturation of Internet marketing. As both the general economy and postal rates settle down, it will be proven that “rumors of catalogs’ demise” continue to be over-stated. With catalogers’ continuously responsive use of recycled paper and tree replanting, as well as their close attention to self-regulation, this responsible industry is primed for greater growth going forward

    The catalog will always drive decisions for a long time to come. Even after the migration of orders from call centers to the internet, the catalog is still showing consistent revenue. It is the catalog that is still driving the customer to the internet. Both channels provide a very symbiotic relationship. There would be a very real negative impact without any one channel. Take advantage of these changes and you can print a powerful catalog that brings in massive return on investment.

    For more information on Arandell solutions visit: http://www.arandell.com/services/

    Catalogs are Good for Disadvantaged and Rural Americans

    Posted on November 09, 2011

  • Catalogs can be the only alternative for shut-ins, infrimed, handicapped, elderly or those with limited mobility.
  • Catalogs provide viable shopping venues for rural citizens who live too far from stores.
  • Catalogs provide the older population with well-being benefits. The regular contact with letter carriers and delivery service providers who deliver packages to the home reduce the sense of isolation and provide beneficial human contact and a “safety-net,” helping seniors stay connected to the community and creating a sense of normalcy so critical to well-being and mental health.
  • Catalogs enable people to lend a helping hand to those they do not know, including the poor, destitute or imperiled throughout the world (consider, for example, Heifer International, CARE, NWF or other nonprofits that have catalog businesses).
  • Catalog companies do not have to be located in urban centers and can instead create quality jobs for rural America. High-employment catalog companies are found in locations such as Freeport, Maine; Dodgeville, Wisconsin; Dyersville, Iowa; and many other remote locations.

    • GOING BEYOND THE PRINTED PAGE

    Catalogs are a point of emphasis and expertise but our services go much further. We have systems in place – green initiatives, innovative co-mail solutions, on-time delivery assurance, single web presses, experienced press associates, direct marketing services and intelligent mail expertise are among the extensive range of services that we have to offer.

    Each of these services provides our customers with a competitive advantage. In this ever-changing, constantly evolving world, customers need help navigating their options. Arandell is here to serve as a compass to our customers – to guide them through the dynamic world of multichannel marketing.

    OUR PROMISE

    To create meaningful partnerships and deliver expert solutions that go far beyond expectations.

    For more information on our services visist www.arandell.com

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