Mailers and vendors may be concerned about the looming increases in postal rates, but they’re not panicked, if a panel of pundits is any indication.
Take the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jody Malordy, the institution’s general manager of marketing and publicity for merchandising activities, said it would be cutting mail volume, primarily among efforts directed at its house file by around 5%.
“We knew we would be doing this before [the new postage rates] became a reality, Malordy said. “The older lists weren’t performing as well.”
For the Met, circulation fluctuations follow a cyclical pattern. “We’re a niche market, and our product categories stay the same,” she said. “We’re not that alarmed about cutting circulation. We’re cutting the bottom of the bottom.”
At Suarez Corporation Industries, which sells a wide variety of products via direct marketing, director of marketing Thomas W. Betts’s mail plans are even more bullish. “Our house file mailing schedule is aggressive. Cutting mail back is a last resort.”
Betts did own up that “the Postal Service did give us strong constraints [in terms of penalizing pieces that don’t conform to a limited set of sizes and shapes]. Whether you’re a letter or flat mailer, you need to work in a template it wants to see. As creative people our job is to figure it out. At some point through testing we will come up with a unique envelope design.”
But Betts isn’t rushing into a complete reformatting of his company’s efforts. “My director of printing asked ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘Nothing until we do testing.'”
Some mailers, he noted, use the size of their envelope or catalog as a branding mechanism. “By changing your size are you changing your image?” Betts asked. “Can you safely change your envelope design?”
Others feel economics may trump image. “The Post Office is saying ‘if you don’t meet our requirements, match our files, you are going to pay heavily,'” said Eric Snider, executive vice president of marketing for SkillPath Seminars. As a result, “List hygiene is going to be a more important part come August.”
Mailers, Snider said, should look carefully at address standardization and sending out pieces that conform to the advantageously priced sizes. In some cases, this may mean that a standard 8 1/2″ by 11″ package becomes more economically viable as a standard letter — provided, of course, that response and conversion rates bear this out.
And Brian Bomberger, vice president of sales and marketing for MetroGroup Marketing Services Inc., urged mailers to re-examine their use of drop-entry discounts.
“Look at your numbers,” Bomberger said. “Even flat mailers need to test presorting software.” The economics of using sectional center facility (SCF) or bulk mail center (BMC) mail drops, he said, will change as mail costs rise and freight costs remain the same.
The panel was part of the 2007 Direct Media Client Conference & Co-op.
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