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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.

    • Happy Holidays from Arandell

    Posted on December 22, 2011

    On behalf of all of us at Arandell Corporation, Happy Holidays, Feliz Navidad (Mexico), Joyeux Noel (France), Kala Christouyenna (Greece), Nollaig Shona Dhuit (Irish), Buone Feste Natalizie (Italian), Maligayan Paskol (Philippines), Bozego Narodezenie (Polish), and Natale Hiare are et Annum Faustum (Latin).

    The holidays mean happiness in any language!

    2012 promises to be a busy year for Arandell with lots of exciting new services/offerings and events in the planning stages. Be sure check back for updates.

    If you have any suggestions or requests for future blog posts, please send an Email . We thank you for all of your feedback so far and look forward to adding more in 2012.

    5 Tips from the New Best Practices for Circulation Management

    Posted on December 21, 2011

    The recession forced mailers to use their circulation more efficiently.  Smart circulation planners will leverage these lessons to squeeze more profits as we emerge from the recession.  Don’t think that because response rates have stabilized that your circulation planning should return to business as usual.

  • Circulation planners are optimizing their house and prospecting lists to suppress the households that won’t buy.  The cooperative databases and merge-purge houses can score your mail files and tell you which households are not worth mailing.  Plan on cutting your catalog cost for printing and postage a minimum of 10% to 15% without hurting top line revenue.  That 10% savings drops to your bottom line. The older your RFM segments, the more suppression opportunities you’ll find. Vertical lists and magazine lists have even more potential to prune circulation than your house file.  Optimization is the tool to precisely trimthe fat in your circulation.
     
  • Shoppers have been trained to wait for promotions…because smart shoppers know promotions are coming.  It’s becoming clear that a series of smaller promotional offers are better than the occasional big promotional splash.  Shoppers may respond just as well to 10% as 40% off….so don’t train your customers to wait for the next big promotion.  First, they won’t buy till they get a big promotion and Second, when they do buy, your margins are squeezed hard.  Don’t have your promotions end too soon; don’t cut off your catalog’s response too soon with a promotion that ends long before the natural end of a catalog’s life!  Promotions need to be in synch across on line and off line channels so that customers don’t learn to ignore your catalog and just wait for the e-mail promo to arrive.
     
  • On line behavioral targeted ads are smoking hot.  Traditional off line marketers must learn how to use on line ads.  The ROI on programs that use cookies to serve ads to your own web site traffic will make you a hero.  On line ad programs are cheap, profitable, scalable, and with metrics that make them easy to manage. 
     
  • Virtual catalogs drive web traffic especially when catalog links are featured in an e-mail campaign.  Virtual catalogs don’t get much respect because they are so cheap (at $10 per page, a 64 page catalog costs all of $640.)  Send out an e-mail with a link to your new virtual catalog and watch traffic and sales spike!  Send your virtual catalog to everyone on your e-mail list and reactivate those marginal names you can’t afford to include in your circulation plan. 
     
  • Attribution, or which channel gets credit for the sale, is a huge issue.  Good work is being done on the web side to properly allocate sales between multiple programs.  Catalogers have match back programs but match backs tend to give too much credit to the house file.  Learn to back out sales from e-mails and web programs from your match backs and you’ll mail smarter.  Use mail / no-mail hold out panels to measure the true impact of your catalog.
     
    Use those best practices learned during the recession to craft circulation plans that maximize profitability.

    • 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.

    What to do in the face of increased postal costs

    Posted on December 16, 2011

    So postage is going to go up for catalogers again this Spring. This is not the first time and in all likelihood it won’t be the last.

    Every time the USPS has increased rates in the past, catalogers have mailed fewer books. Marginal circulation has been eliminated. It is a downward spiral. It is a pretty simply formula, i.e., increase the cost and reduce expense by mailing less and revenue remains about the same (or decreases).

    So if you are planning on mailing less this year plan on making less revenue.  If you don’t want to make the same or less revenue let me suggest a radical strategy. This is the time to increase your circulation! Why? You need more customers to cover increase costs. How do you get more customers? You mail more catalogs to prospects.  Another positive is that most WILL decrease circulation, what will that create? Less catalogs in the mailbox = less compteition.

    USPS Delays Closings until May

    Posted on December 14, 2011

    The U.S. Postal Service will delay the closing or consolidation of additional Post Offices or mail processing facilities until May 15, 2012. The USPS said on Tuesday that it made the decision in response to a request made by multiple U.S. Senators.

    The U.S. Postal Service is studying 3,700 of its nearly 32,000 retail offices for possible closure as it faces an ongoing financial crisis, and is planning to close about half (250) of its processing facilities. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said it was considering the retail closures because customer’s habits “have made it clear that they no longer require a physical post office to conduct most of their postal business.”

    Tuesday’s announcement came a week after the Postal Service announced it would move ahead with plans to lower its service standards for First-Class mail. The move, which it said would generate annual savings of $2.1 billion, would mean in effect the end of overnight delivery for First-Class mail.

    In its announcement yesterday, the Postal Service said it would continue all necessary steps required for the review of the facilities during the interim period, including public input meetings.

    “The Postal Service hopes this period will help facilitate the enactment of comprehensive postal legislation. Given the Postal Service’s financial situation and the loss of mail volume, the Postal Service must continue to take all steps necessary to reduce costs and increase revenue.”

    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.

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