When PraiseBanners mailed 10,000 1999 catalogs last August, the religious pennants-and-flags company cut its storage fees and generated more than $25,000 from long-lost customers. Not bad for a $5,000 investment.
PraiseBanners typically mails between 60,000 and 70,000 64- to 72-page catalogs in the fall, and another 10,000 to 20,000 annually to requesters, who respond through its Web site (www.praisebanners.com) or call center (1-800-Banners). It also does an annual 50,000- to 60,000-piece mailing of an 8- to 12-page booklet, which focuses on a single product category. That mailing is timed to coincide with Easter.
While its traditional annual catalog print run is 100,000 copies, in 1999 PraiseBanners doubled that. At the time, the company expected the book to last for three years’ worth of mailings, says owner Drew Trotman.
It didn’t. After the following year’s mailing, PraiseBanners raised prices 10%. This left 40,000 copies of the 1999 catalog sitting in storage, where by mid-2002 they had racked up nearly $1,500 in pallet fees. They also represented $20,000 of the $100,000 in design and printing charges the full run had cost. This was a pretty hefty amount for a company with an annual marketing budget of $250,000.
“I had been saying, ‘There’s got to be a way to use those catalogs,’” Trotman says.
“While all the material and prices may not be current, there is value. I’m not about to throw them away or shred them.”
Trotman initially consulted with Jim Seybert, of marketing strategy firm The Jim Seybert Co., who was intrigued by the idea. “The printers will hate you, but the catalog companies will love you,” Seybert told him.
PraiseBanners elected to dot-whack a “big, ugly sticker” onto the front cover of each catalog. The sticker offered customers a chance to place orders at 1999 prices, provided they contact PraiseBanners by late September — traditionally a slow month for the company, notes Trotman.
It took a few tries for PraiseBanners’ design team to meet the catalog’s needs.
“The designer firm presented a really artistic dot-whack, and I said no, it has to be ugly. The artist wanted to make sure that it matched the cover. Everyone who has ever done this wanted to make [the sticker] fit in,” Seybert says.
Rebuffed, the artist came back with a stunningly ugly combination involving green lettering on a purple background. “I think it was an ‘OK, you want ugly?’ But you couldn’t really read it. We scaled it back,” Seybert adds.
Either the dot-whack worked, or customers were responding to two types of nostalgia. The first was a gentle reminder of PraiseBanner’s previous relationship with them, and the second hearkened back to a time when the company’s prices were cheaper.
And it wasn’t like the Nashville, TN-based firm was taking an exceptional loss on the old prices. Every so often PraiseBanners offers sale prices ranging up to 25% off selected merchandise. Prices in the catalog rose 30% since the 1999 version had been printed.
Trotman went into his 100,000-name order database and pulled customers who had made purchases in the past three years, but whom he hadn’t heard from for some 18 months. He wound up with 10,000 names. Each received a copy of the catalog that bore the special sticker on its cover.
The 10,000 dot-whacks cost around $500, with the company spending another $4,500 on postage. PraiseBanners didn’t incur any additional database costs.
The trial expenses may have been modest, but the returns were significant. The average PraiseBanner catalog order is $200. The re-contact campaign generated about $250 per shipment during its discount period, and recipients were still buying merchandise at full price after the promotion ended. All customers received a current catalog with their order.
Even during the promotion, customers weren’t just cherry-picking over the discounted merchandise. The dot-whack excluded a few items from the special, such as fabric and kits for do-it-yourself banners. When customers called into PraiseBanner’s service center, or went onto its Web site (the company does not take orders through the mail), they were willing to pay full price for the excluded items.
“A dot-whack can make just about anything a new catalog,” Trotman says.
Trotman plans to continue the re-contact strategy until he runs out of 1999 catalogs. “We have another 30,000 catalogs. Since this test went well, we will mail them out within the next 12 months.” He wants to go further back in recency until the mailings stop being profitable.
While Trotman is not committed to making overruns a permanent part of his mailing strategy, he is much more comfortable with ordering larger quantities of his catalogs. Either initially or eventually, he feels they’ll make him money.
PraiseBanners intended to mail an additional 13,000 catalogs Dec. 27. Half were to go to prospects the company had not heard from or solicited during the previous 24 to 48 months. The other half would be sent to a compiled file of religious merchandise buyers.
Trotman will send out the final 13,000 books at the end of June to bump up his company’s July sales.
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