An array of large and small merchants activated their secure account at Catalog Choice in November. You will recognize some names and others may be new companies that you may want to support as they are now honoring mail preference requests from our members.
Here is our monthly shout out list:
Western Psychological Services
See all the participating merchants listed on the Cool Catalogs page.
We received the following email in our customer support center:
I would just like to inform you that a campaign on ThePoint.com has just “tipped” and users have raised $3,158 to pay Steven Padget back for the fines that he incurred for his failure to deliver junk mail.
Due to the national attention that this story has received, I thought that you might like to inform your readers that Steve has found justice in supporters who have used a collective action website to do good.
About The Point
Established in 2007 in Chicago and empowered by tipping point methodology,The Point is an online community that helps individuals organize efficient group action, leveraging the power of the Web to solve problems and be a catalyst for change.If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Kindest Regards,
B to B magazine recently published an interview with the new Postal Regulatory Vice Chairman Nancy Langely titled “Addressing direct-mail deliverability and anti-marketing initiatives“. At first, I was concerned that we were going to be labeled an anti-marketing initiative, but when I read Nancy’s comment about Catalog Choice, I was please that she described us as a solution that direct mailers should work with. The excerpt is below:
BtoB: One of the challenges to direct marketers is various consumer efforts to restrict marketing mailing. Some of it seems intended to give consumers more control over what they receive, but other initiatives seem almost anti-marketing. What is your view?
Langley: Catalog Choice is a service that helps recipients reduce the frequency of catalog mailings, or eliminate unsolicited ones. It lets direct mailers show their customers they’re acting responsibly by eliminating duplications, and that they’re also environmentally friendly with recycled paper.
Catalog Choice is about connecting consumers and companies to stop unwanted mail. Without willing partners on both sides of the conversation, we can not be successful. We continue to work with direct mailers help them mail smarter by eliminating unsolicited mailings. It is taking time, but mailers are warming to the concept of accepting mail preference requests from Catalog Choice. Our solution makes good business sense because it provides direct mailers with the tools to customize their mail preference choices and adheres to strict security standards. Companies can learn more about activating their free Catalog Choice account by visiting the Catalog Choice Merchant home page and contacting a Merchant Account manager.
While many of you are frustrated that the holiday catalogs you opted-out of last year are back, please recognize that changing the practices of a $68 billion dollar industry takes time. We are on the front line working with VP’s of Marketing and CEO’s of multi-channel merchants (web, catalog, brick and mortar). We are signing agreements with the country’s largest catalog mailers and hundreds of others that guarantees the following
We are the only company in the United States that has negotiated a do not mail agreement with companies on behalf of its members. It has taken hundreds of hours of meetings, legal review and negotiations to strike these agreements. Our license agreement sets the foundation for the success of our service for years to come.
So, when you get an unwanted catalog in the mail yet again - don’t shoot the messenger, join our movement and help us get all the companies to honor your requests. The business agreement is in place and the technology is in place. It just takes willingness on the part of the merchant to honor your request.
In the long-run, connecting companies and consumers to communicate mail preferences will stop unwanted catalogs. Thanks for your continued support.
Mailman Steve took the issue of unsolicited mail into his own hands. According the News & Observer,
This spring, postal inspectors discovered years worth of junk mail piled in the garage of Padgett’s Raleigh home and buried in his yard. All were third-class pieces of mail, including direct mailings and circulars that advertisers use to offer up deals on pizzas, windows and oil changes. Padgett pleaded guilty in August.
At least the judge was not hard on him:
Mailman Steven Padgett received a probationary sentence today from a sympathetic judge for failing to deliver years worth of junk mail on his Apex route.
“Today you’ll get credit for a life well lived,” U.S. District Judge James C. Dever III told Padgett. Dever could have sent Padgett to prison under federal sentencing guidelines; instead, he put him on three years’ probation, fined him $3,000 and ordered him to perform 500 hours of community service.
If only Steve knew about Catalog Choice and how we work to connect companies and consumers to reduce unwanted mail and go paperless!
The answer to this question is as complex as the network of systems and service providers that enable the direct mail process.
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse provides information on many of the ways your name and address get on lists used to send direct mail. You can review their information on this topic here. The following is a brief summary.
If you have done any of the following recently, your name and address are likely on various name rental lists:
1. Participated in a supermarket loyalty club (except California, which prohibits supermarkets from selling such personally identifiable data to third parties (California Civil Code 1749.60).
2. Subscribed to a magazine.
3. Filled out a warranty or registration card.
4. Given money to a charity.
5. Entered sweepstakes.
6. Purchased products online or through a catalog.
7. Carried a mortgage on a home
8. Had a baby
Basically, if you are an active consumer in today’s economy, your name and address are on numerous direct mail lists. Some companies rent these lists when they send out catalogs in hope of gaining new customers. They don’t just mail their catalog to anybody. They use sophisticated analysis to identify prospective consumers whose purchasing patterns make them a good prospect for the company’s products. It is expensive to rent the list, analyze the data, produce and mail the catalog.
Some Catalog Choice members have complained on this blog and to our customer service team that they are receiving more catalogs since they started using our service. Let me describe why it is highly unlikely that your participation in our service is the cause of additional catalogs, what Catalog Choice is doing to protect your privacy and how we are working to reduce the volume of unsolicited mailings in the United States.
First and foremost, Catalog Choice does not rent or trade your name with anybody. This notion flies in the face of our mission, values, ethics, by-laws and business practices. If a customer service representative at a catalog company tells you that we rent and sell names (several have started this rumor), recognize that this employee is not properly informed and politely direct them to get their facts straight. You can refer them to the ACMA press release about Catalog Choice, the recent DMNews article titled Mail Crowd Rallies for Choice or our Merchant FAQ to get the straight scoop.
Second, merchants who are participating in the Catalog Choice merchant account program have signed a license agreement that prohibits them from renting, trading or sharing the names of Catalog Choice members with anybody. They can only use the personally identifiable information provided by Catalog Choice to fulfill the mail preference request entered at our site.
Third, it has been surmised by some that merchants are trading the names of Catalog Choice members with others so that consumers will become discouraged with our service. While anything is possible, we believe that it is highly unlikely that a given merchant would spend thousands of dollars to mail catalogs to consumers who have taken the time opt-out on our site. Why would the mailer risk their brand value and financial resources on this? They want to mail people who will buy their products. Just to make sure that this practice does not occur, we will be instituting a list seeding program. Through list seeding, we will include specific names in each merchant’s list that if mailed will provide clear evidence of the mailer’s violation of our confidentiality agreement.
Fourth, we never release your email address. When you make an opt-out request with a most merchants not participating in our service, send the request via email on your behalf by using a unique catalogchoice.org email address that we create for each member-catalog title. We are not willing to trade a well managed physical mailbox for an email inbox clutter with unwanted email.
I hope this post helps our members understand the source of new catalogs you may be receiving during the holiday season and the steps we are taking to build a secure, scalable mail preference service. So, this holiday season, if you get a new catalog and you don’t want it in the future, add it to My Choices and we will work tirelessly to get your preference honored. If you get a catalog that has products you like and you enjoy receiving it, then keep that one coming. The choice is yours.
If you want to suppress your name from most name rental lists, the best bet at this time is to register your name on the Direct Marketing Association’s Do Not Rent list. DMA members are suppose to honor this list and not mail catalogs to prospects on this list. You can register for this list at http://dmachoice.org. Once you register for this service, go to Other Mail Offers under the Manage My Mail menu on the left hand side of the site.
As always, thanks to all the members who dedicate their valuable time entering your mail preference requests at Catalog Choice. Without your time and effort, we would not have made such significant progress working with the direct mail industry to reduce unwanted mail over the past year. With your continued support, we are dedicated to have the best title-specific mail preference service in the country - a service that allows you to choose the mail you no longer wish to receive, reduce the frequency of other titles and go paperless with any merchant.
This holiday season, join thousands of other Catalog Choice members by showing your support for the merchants that are leading the way by honoring your Catalog Choice request. Over 340 catalog titles are participating in our program and new ones are added every day. Start your holiday shopping with these merchants by visiting the Cool Catalogs page.
Everyday our team of merchant account managers talk to senior staff at catalog companies to encourage them to activate their secure account so that we can guarantee that your mail preference request is honored. Without a merchant account, we deliver your request via email and password-protected CD. While our email system is effective, it does not come with the privacy protections and explicit agreement to honor your request that are included in our license agreement. By the way, our email system does not use your email address. It uses an address that we create for each member and catalog title. Just one more way we are working on your behalf to protect your privacy.
Even though our team is spread across the country, we ring the “virtual merchant bell” every time a merchant activates their account. In one fell swoop, an activated account means that we know that tens or even hundreds of thousands of opt-out requests will be honored now and into the future.
You can help us ring the merchant bell by encouraging non-participating merchants to activate their account when you follow-up with them.
And if they tell you that they are not signing up because Catalog Choice charges them or sells names - you should let them know that is not the case.
The collective efforts of the Catalog Choice community are making a difference. In the first year of operations, we have successfully connected over a million households with hundreds of companies that are eliminating over 100 million unwanted catalog mailings annually, saving money and preserving over 250,000 trees or enough energy to power 6,000 homes per year.
More work needs to be done as unwanted catalogs continue to arrive from merchants who are not yet participating in Catalog Choice. You can show your support for those merchants who are working with Catalogchoice.org this holiday season by going to the Cool Catalogs section of Catalogchoice.org to start your holiday shopping. Support the companies that respect your choice and share your sustainability beliefs.
In the end, it is about consumer choice and giving you a convenient, trusted and free way to easily express their mail preferences. It is clear that many companies are sensitive to consumer needs and wants and they share an environmental ethic. It is also clear that more work needs to be done to make the direct marketing system work for the target audience - me and you - “Joe the consumer”.
The Climate Group has developed a website - Together.com - that provides practical solutions from brands and NGOs that anyone can use to do something to improve climate change. We believe in practical solutions, so Catalog Choice has become a Together.com partner. You can see a reference to our solution here and more information about our involvement here.
There is no silver bullet to fighting climate change. Together.com provides an array of simple solutions that you can adopt. Here is a sample of some that you will find on their site:
The following quote was authored by Colleen Connell, President of Gaelsong, a multi-channel (catalog and web) merchant. She tells the story of Catalog Choice from the merchant’s perspective so I thought it would be great to let all of our readers see it. I found this comment when visiting the TerraPass blog. TerraPass, a carbon offset company, authored two blog posts on the topic of junk mail. The comment string on this orginial blog post was so active, that Adam Stein published a second post with both Colleen’s and my comments. I followed up with Colleen to get her permission to republish her comment here. There is only one clarification that is necessary. She indicates that only participating merchants in Catalog Choice get your opt-out request. In fact we deliver the requests to many merchants who are not participating via email, password protected CD and they can download their file from a secure server. We are developing new tools to improve the success of fulfilling requests from non-participating merchants. More on this later.
In Colleen’s words:
I own a mail-order catalog company and have direct experience with both the DMA and Catalog Choice (as well as experience talking to people who want to be removed from our mailing list). If you just get a few catalogs that you don’t want, the most effective method is to contact those catalogs directly. But if you are being bombarded with loads of different unwanted catalogs, the best approach is to use both catalogchoice.org and dmachoice.org.
I recommend catalogchoice.org over the DMA’s service, but if you want to be sure to have your opt-out request honored, you should use both sites.
Also, whenever you place an order with a mail-order catalog company or subscribe to a magazine, you should request that they not rent or share your name with any other company.
Catalogchoice.org allows you to choose which catalogs you don’t want to receive at all; it also allows you to choose the frequency of catalogs that you do like but that you may be receiving too frequently.
Originally the DMA and many members of the catalog industry opposed Catalog Choice, but I am among a growing number of merchants who think that they are performing an extremely important role for consumers, the environment, and even for the catalog industry itself. Due to the DMA’s opposition, Catalog Choice got off to a slow and controversial start, but more and more merchants are cooperating with them every day.
The DMA is finally starting (very reluctantly) to see the light and they have modified their opt-out site to be more like Catalog Choice. The problem is that only the merchants who are members of the DMA can access the list of people who have opted out of receiving their catalogs. So if you opt out on the DMA site but the cataloger is not a DMA member, they will not know that you requested to be off their list. Likewise, if you opt out on Catalog Choice’s site, only merchants who are cooperating with Catalog Choice get that data. (See above for clarification on this point). As more and more people use catalogchoice.org, more merchants will use their service and it will become more effective.
Also, please be aware that it really does take up to three months to get someone off a mailing list, so you need to be patient. The list for any given mailing is prepared weeks if not months in advance. If you are still getting unwanted catalogs after three months, I would recommend contacting the catalog directly and requesting again and tell them to use the Catalog Choice and DMA Choice services!