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Archive for the ‘How to reduce your catalog production costs’ Category

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.

    • 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

    Catalog Printing Trends – Go Full Color

    Posted on December 05, 2011

    Full Color printing is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity in many industries. Today, everyone is producing full color catalogs. Customers have come to expect big color images alongside catalog product descriptions to help them make a decision between products. But you don’t have to justify the jump to full color just to beat your competition — full-color images have a better sales rate because they simply look better.  To make yourself even more distinctive, put a spin on it and produce a catalog with special coatings or speciality colors.

    Having similar concerns? 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.

    Catalogs are Good for the Economy

    Posted on November 06, 2011

    The catalog industry has a wide-sweeping impact on American culture, well beyond the economic benefits of employing millions of people, paying millions in federal, state and local taxes, and conserving energy and natural resources. The American catalog experience has significant and important social benefits to American culture and consumers and the economy.

  • Catalogs stimulate consumer demand, both for direct and retail, fuelling the largest engine of economic activity we have.
  • Catalogs are highly targeted and merchandised to meet specific consumer interests and needs, thus representing an effective and efficient marketing channel to maintain and strengthen American competitiveness.
  • Catalog brands have a long-term relationship with Americans that is part of the shared American experience. The ability to come back to trusted brands and companies for the things we need, knowing the consistency and helpfulness we will find as consumers can be relied upon again and again. This is a high ideal of American commerce.
  • The robust American catalog shopping expereince allows for a shift in power from the retailer to the consumer.
  • Catalogs are mailed predominately to willing customers who may have a pre-existing relationship with retailers, or to those consumers who have requested a catalog from a company they are interested in shopping with, or to other “opted-in” consumers who have expressed interest in receiving marketing information or specific offers.
  • Catalogs help small and large businesses succeed.

    • To Tab or Not to Tab Slim Jims

    Posted on August 05, 2009

    Don Landis, Vice President, Postal and Government AffairsSeptember 8 is quickly approaching and you know what that means…the USPS will require 3 tabs on all letter-size booklets, or “slim jims.” When these regulations take effect, catalogers mailing slim jims under the letter-size postage rate must transition from 2 tabs to 3 non-perforated tabs. (Click here for additional information about the new tabbing specifications.) The industry is well aware of the requirements and testing has been taking place and will continue to determine if the 3-tab requirement reduces slim jim response rates.

    Arandell Corporation is prepared for the new letter-size booklet regulations and has been heavily involved in testing 3 tabs versus 2 tabs for our customers. [Although we are not currently equipped to tab the oblong digest format (which is only one type of tabbed Letter-Size mail), to meet the new regulations, if we do see a come-back in demand for it, we will certainly reconsider investing in that technology. To clarify, an oblong digest is a digest catalog that stitches on the short side.] 

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