We know that change can be hard, but this change is really exciting. All summer we have been hard at work on a major upgrade to Catalog Choice. In addition to several great new features described below, we are sprucing up the site design, streamlining the process of making opt-outs, and giving you more ways to reduce unwanted mail. First, we are dropping the bright green background and opting for a lighter white background for the site. Second, we are dropping the blue navigation bar in favor of a dark red and earth green navigation bar. Those are the simple design changes we are making. Get used to the new look here on the blog. The whole site will be upgraded in mid-September.
Enough with the design, the really important changes are:
Improved Dashboard and status monitoring. Look for any requests that require action on your part to complete. Sometimes the opt-out takes a little back and forth before it is done. We are also implementing a feature to automatically email you an update of your dashboard if there are actions for you to take or if there is an update to the status of your requests.
Calculating the Environmental Benefits (currently titled Choice Audit). Working with our colleagues at the Environmental Defense Fund, we have used their Paper Calculator to estimate the benefit our community is having on the environment. The Environmental Benefits show you the amount of natural resources our community has saved as well as your individual contribution.
Introducing the Activity Statement (sorry no screen shot yet). The Activity Statement is your complete record of preference choices that you have made with a company. It will include every unique name – address pair and the various customer numbers that you have documented. The Activity Statement lists when you made the request, when the company received it, any message that we have received from the company, and your reply. For each name – address pair, we list the status of the request. We hope that they all become confirmed, but we have learned that sometimes companies don’t reply to your request.
Automated Dispute Process. Some of you have contacted our customer service department to let us know of companies that have not honored your request. Our customer service team diligently contacts the company and gets your name removed in the cases. But with the holiday season just around the corner and the coverage of our service increasing, we needed to automate the process of you filing a dispute. With the new release, you will be able to file a formal complaint with any company that violates their privacy policy and does not honor your request. We are working on formalizing relationships with specific government entities so that your complaint can also be forwarded to the authorities.
Cool Companies Respect Your Choice. We are upgrading the Cool Companies section of our site which highlights those companies that are doing a good job honoring opt-out choices. Cool Companies will become Respected Choice Certified companies. More on this exciting initiative later.
More titles, more categories. We have received over 650,000 suggestions for new title additions. Many of these suggestions are for the same company but often spelled slightly differently. With the help of an algorithm developed by Vladimir Levenshtein we disambiguated the suggestions to determine the important titles to add to our service. After visiting the website of thousands of suggested titles, we systematically added new titles to the service. Catalog Choice currently includes more than 3,000 titles and counting. In the All Companies section of the site, you will also find short-cuts for Phonebooks, credit card offers, and coupons.
Making Opt-Outs Easier. As our faithful members know, sometimes we have to open the opt-out or contact form for a company and you have to enter the information to opt-out. We hate this process, but for some companies it is our only option. In September when we release the new version of the service, we will provide you with the name, mailing address, private email address, and any special instructions on the page when we present the company’s opt-out form. This will make it much easier to fill out the form.
There is one more really big change …. stay tuned for the announcement next week.
Most of us have spent time scouring websites to determine how to opt-out of marketing material and name sharing. Typically, this information is found in the company’s privacy policy. At Catalog Choice, our team reads countless privacy policies so you don’t have to. Some companies articulate opt-out procedures clearly and easily. (Thank you!) Other policies may direct the consumer to call the company but provide no electronic means of opting out. (Frustrating!) Some direct mailers still provide no privacy policy on their website. (Unbelievable!) Burying contact preference information and making it difficult for consumers to opt-out does not translate into better business. Quite the opposite. We’ve found only two companies—Uncommon Goods and Crate and Barrel—that link their preference center directly from their website footer. The feedback we get about these companies couldn’t be better. Choice is a customer service advantage.
Today, consumers are confronted with a proliferation of communication channels for staying in touch with marketers—mail, email, Facebook, Twitter, mobile. What if marketers looked at these contact choices through the lens of “How do customers want to hear from us?” What if they featured all choices prominently on their website instead of hiding opt-out procedures in their legal and privacy statements?
We think you’d find something that looks like a tool we’ve built for marketers that we call the Contact Preference Center. This feature seamlessly organizes all contact methods and frequency options in one convenient place, allowing consumers to pick how they’d like to hear from a company from any page on a their website. Our friends at UncommonGoods use this tool and here’s what they have to say about its benefits:
Implementing the Contact Preference Center has made it much easier for us to respect our customers’ wishes for how they want to be reached. Instead of making them engage in a frustrating hunt for a way to remove themselves from our mailing list, we show them what they want and give them a handful of alternative ways to keep in touch with us. It also provides us with an easy-to-use tool for customer service representatives to respond to opt-out requests, centralizing the system by which we collect them from both the call center and online customers.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. With the topic of consumer privacy heating up in Washington, there is no better time for marketers to take a look at how they facilitate consumer preferences. We think the Contact Preference Center is a model for how companies can make it easy for the consumer to express their communication and privacy choices.
Many catalog mailers are cautiously dipping their toes into the pool of social media, trying to figure out how to translate these new communication channels into sales. But Urban Outfitters is diving in and embracing social media with impressive results. The trendy apparel company, which has three popular brands – Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters – scrapped earlier plans to boost catalog circulation and instead is investing in “technology and people.” Despite flat-lining catalog mailings, the company’s direct sales recently jumped 20%, boosted by a 28% increase in website traffic. With numbers to back their success, Urban Outfitters is a great example of how a company can reduce reliance on catalogs by embracing social media as an important part of the marketing mix. To get the full scoop, check out this article.
We’d like to welcome new direct mailers to our service! These marketers include catalog companies and nonprofit organizations. Here are more terrific titles that have recently joined Catalog Choice to honor your mail preferences. Support these companies by visiting their websites and checking out what they have to offer.
Catalog shopping is convenient and unconstrained by geography. You can shop 24/7 without dealing with traffic, parking, or closed stores. Catalogs define “universal access.” Granted, one could argue that the internet does the same thing, but many of us enjoy leisurely flipping the glossy pages of our favorite catalogs.
Catalogs are the ultimate Un-Walmart experience. They represent the opposite of Big Box retail consolidation. Catalogs and their websites offer an astounding assortment of niche and hard-to-find products that you just can’t locate anywhere else.
Catalog marketing helps small businesses. Direct mail companies don’t have to be located in urban America to thrive, thus creating jobs in rural regions of the country.
If you live in rural America too far from stores, catalog shopping provides a viable alternative. The same convenience rings true for the busy working moms, the elderly, or the disabled.
Now, before you start thinking that online shopping can completely replace catalog shopping, think again. The paper catalog is responsible for generating more than half of online sales for most companies that use the direct mail channel.
A growing number of catalog mailers are improving the catalog’s environmental footprint by choosing recycled and FSC-certified paper (that stands for the Forest Stewardship Council, an international group that sets the “green” standard for forestry products).
And as Catalog Choice can confirm, most catalog companies are ethical marketers, honoring consumer mail preference choices. While there are a handful of stubborn companies that make it difficult to get off their mailing list, overall, catalog mailers have demonstrated a sincere commitment to responsible mailing and privacy practices.
While some have predicted the demise of the printed catalog, this outcome has been exaggerated. The Direct Mail industry has survived huge postal increases as well as the Great Recession and still continues to thrive.
As the steady growth of the formal participation in Catalog Choice shows, we are successfully working with the industry on self-regulation, consumer choice, and environmental standards.
We strive to make the opt-out process as easy as possible. Your time is the ultimate measure of our success. Based on our research, we have found that it can take around 10 minutes to find the contact information for a company, read their privacy policy to determine what you have to do to opt-out and then fulfill the request. That does not count the time you spend doing it over when they fail to honor your first request.
We estimate that you can complete the Catalog Choice opt-out form in around 15 seconds. This tweet from our follower @AllportEditions shows that it took them only 12 seconds per catalog to enter their requests.
What does this all translate to in terms of value:
Assuming an average of 10 minutes per request, it would take 2.8 million hours to submit the 17 million requests already recorded at Catalog Choice. By comparison, at a rate of 15 seconds per title at Catalog Choice, we estimate that it has taken 70,800 hours for our Members to enter the 17 million requests. Assuming a household wage of $5 per hour (just being conservative here) , the Catalog Choice service has saved $13.8 million in household costs to date.
2010 Earth Day member email. Thanks for your support.
Earth Day is turning 40! Celebrate the anniversary by supporting Catalog Choice, your everyday tool for stopping waste. Your contribution will reduce waste at the source and keep trees in the forest where they belong.
Each time you use Catalog Choice to eliminate unwanted mail, we are behind the scenes making it work. We use technology and people power to process over 17 million opt-outs to 1,300 companies. We do our best to be cost-effective, but it is not free.
In celebration of Earth Day, please consider a tax-deductible gift to help fund our work. Can you chip in $10 today?
Since there are no laws governing unsolicited mail, we work to convince companies that honoring requests is the right thing to do. We know it is not perfect. If you are still receiving unwanted mail, learn about the reasons why and what we can do to help here.
We create a unique email address for each opt-out you enter so your personal email address stays private. Companies use this unique email to confirm your request. Learn more about this feature here.
This email message arrived last week. Gay, the author, was happy to have me republish it on our blog. We welcome everyones story.
Thank you SO much for the help in reducing my carbon load. 12 years ago, I lived on a ranch and used catalogs for my Christmas shopping – whoa, did my name ever get spread around. I have always been environmentally conscious, helping to start a recycling program in 1970 in Palo Alto, CA. I rode a bicycle to work for many years and now ride a Vespa. The catalogs were my last big problem to take care of and you have done an amazing, wonderful job. Thank you.
For 30 years the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has collected and reported data on the waste we generate, throw away, and recycle. Municipal Solid Waste is made up of things that residents and businesses commonly use and throw away and does not include industrial, hazardous, or construction waste. The 2008 facts and figures show some interesting trends, positive improvements, and things that we can all do better. Here’s a summary:
In 2008 we generated about 250 million tons of trash. That translates to about 4.5 pounds of trash a day for every American.
We throw away about 19% more stuff than we did in 1980 and a whopping 44% more than we did in 1960. Since 1990 our waste generation has stayed about the same.
Organic materials are the largest component of municipal solid waste. Paper and paperboard account for 31% and yard trimmings and food scraps account for 26%.
Over the decades our waste generation has grown, but our recycling rate has also increased from less than 10% in 1980 to more than 33% in 2008.
Recycling and composting 83 million tons of waste in 2008 reduced CO2 emissions equivalent to keeping 33 million passenger vehicles off the road.
About 8,660 curbside recycling programs exist in the U.S., down from 8,875 in 2002.
The amount of trash we send to landfills has declined from 89% in 1980 to 54% in 2008.
We recover only about one-third of our nondurable goods. Those are the things that generally last less than three years. We do a pretty good job recycling newspapers (88% recycled), cardboard (77%) and high-grade office papers (71%).
Only 40% of magazines and unwanted advertising mail are recycled – the rest still goes to the landfill.
80% of phone books are sent to the landfill.
Our strategy for waste prevention is to stop the waste at the source. We love recycling, but precycling is even better. So encourage your friends, neighbors and co-workers to do their part to reduce the generation of waste in the first place. Step 1 – sign up for Catalog Choice and opt-out of unwanted mail and phonebooks.
Many great solutions start by addressing a household problem (Quicken) and then expand to help your company (Quickbooks). Catalog Choice is following the same path. Today we are pleased to announce that we have added Company Name to the address profile for our Member accounts. At the same time, we have added Company Name to the secure data file that we transfer to the mailer.
If you are a small business owner, you can add your office address to your existing Catalog Choice account. To do this, go to your profile and add a new address. Set the ‘nickname’ for this address to your company name and make sure you add your company name to the address profile.
If you work at a larger company and want to stop the flow of unwanted advertising mail at your office, create a new account dedicated to your office location. You can add names of long lost employees that continue to get mail to your account. We have kept the sign up form simply so Company Name does not appear on the sign up form. After signing up, go to your profile, scroll down to the Address area and edit the address so you can add the Company Name.
We know that the companies that send catalogs and advertising mail to your office are different than those that mail to your home. As a result, we are working on a new system that will streamline the process of suggesting and adding new mailers to our service. In the meantime, use our Suggest a Catalog page to let us know of mailers that you want us to add to our system.
