Response rates plummeted for direct marketers on Tuesday.
“Call volume was down maybe 70% on Tuesday, and e-mails and Web orders were also significantly down,” said Arnold Zaslow, executive vice president of ATD American, an institutional supplies cataloger.
Volume picked up today for ATD, but incoming mail was “very light because the FAA grounded flights,” Zaslow added.
That seemed to square with what firms told the Direct Marketing Association. “A number of firms said that call volume had fallen by 50% to 80%, and a couple said they basically closed down because things were so slow,” said H. Robert Wientzen, president of the DMA.
Meanwhile, call volume was down by 58% from projected levels at Lillian Vernon Corp. Web-based orders during the day were off by 51%.
But call-center volume rebounded so that it was down only 30% from normal levels by mid-day Wednesday. “Business is coming back,” said spokesperson David Hochberg.
The cataloger had received from the manufacturer a delivery of luggage tags and passport holders ordered by the World Trade Center Association. The Vernon sales associate in charge of the account has not been able to track down her contact at the association.
In addition, the company had been negotiating with the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, which had its headquarters in the building, for note cards. The order had not been placed when the attacks took place.
Vernon isolated the names of 46,000 customers within its database that live in lower Manhattan and will suppress the names from catalog mailings, at least for the near future.
Roughly 90% of the 175-person staff, which includes more than 25 people that work in Manhattan, left on Tuesday after being told to do so by founder Lillian Vernon.
The firm has cancelled a Time capsule sealing that had been set for Friday in honor of its 50th anniversary.
Lands’ End experienced a “significant” drop in inbound volume on Tuesday, down two-thirds from normal business, said spokesperson Beverly Holmes.
Large numbers of employees, distraught by the news of the attacks, had asked to go home. The company closed its warehouse at noon, allowing several thousand people to leave. Only 100 out of 1,000 employees were kept on in two of the firm’s call centers in Cross Plains and Dodgeville to maintain operations while a third call center in Reedsburg was closed. Land’s End also closed 16 retail stores. The warehouse, call center–all in Wisconsin–and retail stores were all in operation Wednesday.
Volume remained depressed yesterday.
“Each disaster we go through we see a dramatic drop as people focus on the issue and then slowly the calls do come back,” Holmes said.
The Spiegel Group also experienced a downturn.
The bombings had “a significant impact on our call center volume,” said spokesperson Deb Koopman.
Also, all 300 Eddie Bauer stores were closed.
“Shopping was not people’s first priority,” Koopman said.
MarketBoy.com, an auction-like seller of electronic equipment in which consumers can compare prices and place bids for the best buy, expected business to all but cease the day of the tragedy. Instead, orders increased to about one-and-a-half times the normal volume, said Casimir Wierzynski, president. New software installed a week ago had already boosted order volume, but Tuesday’s performance was beyond that.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that sales are up because of what happened,” Wierzynski cautioned. “One of the biggest things people were doing yesterday was trying to find out if everyone was allright and the only reliable way to do that was to go online. So maybe they were surfing a little bit while news sites were clogged.”
The highest-volume sales were digital cameras and camcorders “things for storing memories and sharing their lives–maybe people were in that mindset,” Wierzynski said.
But there was a personal undertone of sadness for Wierzynski and partner CEO R. May Lee. The pair had previously worked at Goldman Sachs and knew many people who worked in the financial services companies housed in the World Trade Center. “We still don’t know what happened to a lot of our friends,” he said.
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