Trade-ins bombed but indexes excelled for audio/video catalog Crutchfield
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,” says Alan Rimm-Kaufman, vice president of marketing for the Charlottesville, VA-based cataloger of home and car audio/video 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 last month’s 18th annual Catalog Conference in Boston during the panel “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 Working on the hypothesis that some customers were hesitant to buy electronics because high-tech goods can become outdated so quickly, the company decided to offer customers the chance to trade in purchases after one year.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,” says Rimm-Kaufman, 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 says, noting that the idea of returning merchandise may have seemed like a negative concept to customers.
But not all tests fail. Cover indexes 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.
The 27-year-old company has a 2.9-million-name customer base, and mails to 8 million prospects annually. Crutchfield sends out three 150-page “big books” in the spring, summer and fall, as well as numerous 60-page fliers throughout the year.
One big concept — like the trade-in program — is tested in each big book, along with about 10 other smaller tests, like variations in the cover design. Rimm-Kaufman says the latter is particularly important to Crutchfield, and can make or break a catalog’s response. Prior to each large mailing, portions of the customer base are asked to vote on selected designs. The strongest contenders are then included in the drop.
One thing that doesn’t work for Crutchfield is pictures of people. “People bomb,” he says. “We can show pictures of people on TV screens, but we can’t put them on the cover.”
Part of the problem stems from the scale the electronic components (like DVD players or car stereo speakers) are photographed at. The photos are close up and large, so pictures of human beings end up looking strange. Another dilemma is that customers often can’t identify with the models in the shot.
“People will complain and say ‘They don’t look like me’ or ‘They look too rich’ or ‘They look like they’re on drugs,’ notes Rimm-Kaufman, explaining the product-shot-heavy covers.
“So we end up with space age montages.”
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