The facts: Catalog Choice for Merchants is the only free, secure, easy-to-use solution for companies to respect the mail preferences of consumers.
The alternative: Consumers can call a company’s customer support line to make the opt-out request. Based on industry research, it takes three to five minutes to complete a call, and at .70 cents/minute, that will cost the merchant between $2.10 and $3.50 for each opt-out request.
The merchant math: 10,000 opt-out requests @ average cost of $3.00 per call = $30,000.
This is much more expensive than downloading a file. The economics seem compelling to our industry experts and many merchants that we’ve spoken to. In addition to the pure dollars and cents, every merchant we have spoken to knows that it makes good business sense to respect your customers’ mail preference.
On the consumer side of the equation, it takes approximately 10 seconds to complete the opt-out form in Catalog Choice. If you are required to call the merchant to make your request, you can complete your opt-out request for an individual merchant in four minutes, on average.
The consumer math: 50 opt-out requests will take 8.3 minutes to complete at Catalogchoice.org. 50 opt-out phone calls will take 3.3 hours or almost 200 minutes. These are the kinds of productive gains our economy needs – a service that is 24 times faster than the current method and saves resources all in one step. So instead of 550,000 people spending 433,333 hours (18,055 days) opting-out of over 6.5 million titles, Catalog Choice members are applying the power of the Internet and skills of great software developers to do the work much faster.
That is what I call a win-win. Cost savings for merchants and more time in the day for consumers.
If you had three extra hours, what would you do?
