Everyone likes a thank you note, right?
Not exactly. A note from CEO Bill Crutchfield polybagged with Crutchfield’s holiday catalog thanking the best customers for their business and wishing them a happy new year actually hurt response rates by 63%.
"It destroyed income," said Alan Rimm-Kaufmann, vice president of marketing for the Charlottesville, VA-based cataloger of home and car audio/visual products. "The theory is that the polybag may have cheapened the catalog, or people threw it away thinking it was junk mail."
Rimm-Kaufman shared some of his company’s testing victories and defeats at the Catalog Conference "This Worked, That Didn’t," moderated by copywriting guru and DIRECT columnist Herschell Gordon Lewis.
A trade-in program was equally disastrous. Working on the hypothesis that some customers were hesitant to buy electronics because high-tech goods can become outdated so quickly, the company decided to offer customers the chance to trade in purchases after one year. Customers would then receive credit for 63% of their original purchase price, which they could then use on the newest technology.
The program was "hideously complex," said Rimm-Kaufmann, because it involved creating a new accounting system to process the credit transactions. The result of all this hard work? "No one liked it and no one used it," he said, noting the idea of returning merchandise may have seemed like a negative concept to customers.
But not all Crutchfield’s tests failed. Cover indexes have proved popular, and raised response rates by 10% with prospects. And changing the pagination to vary the size of item photos on each page bumped sales of featured electronics up 15%, while not hurting sales of the smaller pictured offerings.
John McManus, president and CEO of the travel catalog Magellan’s, noted that when his company tested a smaller "Slim Jim" format catalog, it worked at first, but didn’t have the legs of its larger, magazine format book, which customers tended to keep on hand for future orders.
When the catalog began in 1989, it experimented using "real people" in its pages, to save on hiring models. But ultimately it realized more than recouped the model fees when it hired professionals and sold more items.
Magellan’s also tested books targeting women travelers and people who liked to go on cruises, hoping to use them as a way to further mine the housefile. The concepts were unsuccessful however, because it was difficult to get them to the right audiences.
Cabela’s has tested a variety of schemes in its copy, noted Kent Walton, a copywriter for the Sydney, NB-based outdoor and hunting gear catalog.
One tenant that has always held true is that the catalog’s tone must sound like its audience. "We keep it informal and in conversational English," he said. "We know our audience isn’t sitting on fine leather sofas sipping wine."
Through trial and errors, Walton said the company has realized it must describe products in as detailed a manner as possible, to highlight why a customer should buy from them and not the competition. And importantly, he added, Cabela’s can’t try to play with words and snow the audience, who is just as educated about the products as the company is.
"Water-resistant is not the same as water-proof, and they know it," he said.
