Let’s Get Serious and Cut

My blog posting on Monday about why you need a web driver catalog hit at an opportune time. (click here if you missed it) That morning, one of our clients had their January mailing cancelled by their printer due to a lack of paper.

?Later in the afternoon, a client shared with me that they had just been told by their printer they would be held to 25% to 40% of 2021 quantities. Holy crap! Forget about the fact that paper costs are going up too. Mailers are being forced to take a potential 40% reduction in business because of a paper shortage, regardless of how much it costs.

?Let’s be optimistic and say that mailers are held flat to last year’s paper quantities. That still puts a damper on potential growth. I’ve been mailing catalogs for 35 years and the paper mills have been dreaming of this day for a long time. They finally hit the right combination of low supplies (caused by all the closed mills) and high demand (brought on by the pandemic), allowing them to drive prices up. Don’t expect that that means they will reopen those closed mills. The last thing they want is to have an increase in production capacity. They are going to make hay while the sun shines because they know eventually demand will go down.

?Meanwhile, the creative agencies and consultants that have been telling you that catalogs are alive and well, are finally saying, “Oh, by the way, there’s a paper shortage. But you can avoid it doing damage to your business if you order your paper early”. How helpful is that? Mon Dieu!

?Let’s get serious. Most of you have done nothing to reduce your reliance on your catalog. As I mentioned in Monday’s blog, Talbot’s dedicated a grand total of two pages out of 88 to driving you to their website in their Holiday catalog. There is simply no excuse for that.

?It’s time to get real folks. If you are going to be held to 40% of last year’s paper, you need to start cutting. If you did 64 pages last Summer, cut it back to 24 or 32 pages. If you do a sale catalog in the spring, replace it with a postcard and allocate that paper to your main mailings.

?Don’t tell me your customers are special and that they need your full 64-page catalog to see your assortment. Just stop thinking that way. Start dropping spreads. Do what you can to stretch your paper supply to maintain the same mail quantity as 2021. Think in terms of maximizing the number of contacts with your customers.

?Where else to cut? If you are a longtime reader of this blog, some of these points are going to be familiar, but I’m going to list them again:

·??????Many of you continue to mail catalogs despite having done holdout tests that show that your catalog only marginally drives incremental demand. Revisit those hold-out tests results now that your catalog costs have increased and recalculate whether it still makes sense to mail.

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·??????Stop mailing a catalog to customers you acquire over the web – they don’t need a catalog and probably don’t want one.

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·??????Unless the average age of your customers is over 75, stop accepting/taking catalog requests. Tell these “prospects” to order online. If consumers complain, just tell them the truth – there’s a terrible paper shortage and you have no catalogs to mail.

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·??????Stop printing bulk catalogs for your stores and for inserting into outbound packages from the warehouse.

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·??????Switch to a digest size catalog. Depending on your printer, they can print two digest-size books from the same trim size as your full-size catalog. Get two for one – we did this back in the late 1980s when I worked at Potpourri. (Oh no Bill – I can’t believe you recommended a digest size catalog! Don’t you remember when Pat Connelly described the test that Williams Sonoma did of their old digest-size book against a full-size book? Of course you do, you even wrote about it - Still Waiting For The 11th Order. The full-size book did much better!) Yes, I do remember that. It was at NEMOA in 1994. Much has changed in the intervening 27 years, including the fact that Sonoma now has a website, which they did not have in 1994. Consumers have adapted – you haven’t. I’m giving you ideas to stretch your paper.

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·??????Stop with the gatefolds and inserts that are a different trim size, which your printer probably talked you into.

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·??????If you are a B2B catalog, do you really need a table of contents in an 80-page catalog? And move all those FAQs pages to your website.

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·??????Stop thinking about adding pages to maximize postage. Those days are gone forever. Think about creating a catalog that says “We’re the expert in selling this stuff. But go to our website to see our full assortment and all the information on our products.”

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·??????And please – as a favor to me – stop wasting pages on nonsense like president’s letters, and “category introductions”. No one reads it. Focus on selling. It’s time to finally grow up and create a catalog that drives response without needing to cut down a forest.

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As I said in my posting on Monday, you can’t just cut pages and expect people are going to go to your website. You have to communicate that your website is better than your catalog. Maybe you do it with videos. Maybe you do it by saying there are stories on the website, recipes, household tips – whatever you sell, find a way to say “you’ll find the reasons you want to buy this stuff on our website.”

Finally, I want to ask you a personal question. How many of you get this kind of advice – how to cut your reliance on your catalog, how to cut your paper consumption – from your existing vendors? Did your printer, your paper broker, list broker, co-op rep, or even your service bureau step up and say “Let’s figure out how you are going to grow without help from a catalog”? And if they did, was it because of the immediate paper shortage, or have they been telling you to do this for years, as I have?

I don’t see too many of you raising your hands. Don’t you think it’s time you called me and started working with Datamann?

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by Bill LaPierre

VP – Business Intelligence and Analytics

Datamann – 800-451-4263 x235

[email protected]

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