We have just launched a new Member Blog powered by Posterous (http://members.catalogchoice.org). Check out the new blog here.
This blog is designed for our Members to share stories about their efforts to reduce unwanted mail and go paperless.
You can share a story on the Member Blog by emailing the story to:
post@catalogchoice.posterous.com
The subject line of your email will be the title of the blog post.
Any photos you include in the email will be included in the blog post.
We are often asked about catalogs on e-readers. Magazines will lead the way. Here is an interesting piece on this topic from the Vimeo.com blog.
This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project
initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on
handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for
digital magazines in the near future, presented by BERG.The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which
people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading
experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up
immersive stories.The concept uses the power of digital media to create a rich and
meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated
features of printed magazines. It has been designed for a world in
which interactivity, abundant information and unlimited options could
be perceived as intrusive and overwhelming.The purpose of publishing this concept video is first and foremost to
spark a discussion around the digital reading experience in general,
and digital reading platforms in particular. Thus, we would be more
than happy to hear what you have to say regarding the concept and
ideas expressed in the video: the magazine reading experience, digital
browsing, text versus images, as well as hear about your own digital
reading experiences and thoughts. We are all ears.Follow the discussion in the Bonnier R&D Beta Lab:
bonnier.com/en/content/digital-magazines-bonnier-mag-prototype
Each week, Unjunk Mail invites an expert to help educate consumers about the issue of unwanted mail. This new website invites environmentalists, privacy pros, and direct marketing gurus to chime into the conversation. Here’s what Catalog Choice managing director April Smith had to say this week…
I confess, I’m a catalog shopper. As a busy working mother living in rural Vermont, I rely on catalogs for a significant portion of my personal and gift shopping. By my bedside, in addition to a good book or two, there’s always a favorite catalog awaiting a quiet moment for my perusal: White Flower Farm, Garnet Hill, Sundance, Athleta, Crate & Barrel. Surfing the internet is no replacement: Work done, my child asleep, and I have time to relax with a cup of tea and my favorite catalogs. I’m transported. One girl’s “junk mail” is another girl’s treasure.
But, Buyer Beware. For years, my mailbox was also stuffed with catalogs I didn’t want. Who reads all that fine print buried in a mailer’s privacy policy? “We do make our mailing list available to carefully screened companies whose products or services might interest you.” Before you could say “Sundance Big Sky Cowboy Hat,” I was literally knee-deep in catalogs, and they kept on coming.
It reminds me of the classic children’s story, “Why the Sea is Salt.” The boat captain asks the handmill to grind salt, and it does, abundantly. Not knowing the magic words to make it stop, however, the mill keeps grinding and grinding, until heaps of salt grow higher with no end in sight. I was swimming in a sea of catalogs.
As an environmental professional, all this waste was terribly troubling to me. I vowed to take action. For years, my sole New Year’s resolution was to collect all my unwanted catalogs and call the companies directly. I remember being on hold with one mailer for nine minutes. I hung up and gave up. Who has time for this inconvenience?
You can imagine my delight when I was offered a position with a new service called Catalog Choice. It was my dream job. Finally! A free and easy way to give consumers a choice about what they want to received in the mail.
Catalog Choice benefits the consumer and the planet – and with the cost of postage and paper rising, the service seemed good for the mailer, too. As the person responsible for signing up companies to participate in Catalog Choice, I heard repeatedly, “Of course we don’t want to mail catalogs to people who don’t want to receive them.” Then why was it such a struggle to get some companies to honor consumer requests?
There is no short answer to this question. We’ll be the first to say we made some mistakes early on. As the new kid in town, we suffered the skepticism of an industry unsure of our motives. While some mailers see the value of removing a name from their mailing list unconditionally, other marketers view Catalog Choice as tinkering with the tried-and-true recipe for success: Tempt consumers enough with beautiful things and they will buy.
Despite our hurdles, in just two years we’ve delivered over 16 million mail preference requests on behalf of over 1.1 million households and continue to facilitate an important and growing conversation between the consumer and the mailer. Direct marketers see us as a voluntary solution to Do Not Mail legislation. And the consumer no longer has to wade through a sea of mail to happily flip through the pages of her favorite catalogs. Now, back to mine!
Saw this short post on John Battelle’s Searchblog about Google buying a Finnish paper mill and converting it into a data center. Now that is what I call going paperless!
Here is the Reuters article.
Slowly but surely the list of participating merchants is growing at Catalog Choice. While you may continue to get some catalogs from the merchants who recently signed up with us, we know that they are putting the processes in place to honor requests going forward.
As Laura states in her blog titled You Must Have Patience, Grasshopper, “Slowly, bit by bit, I received fewer and fewer catalogs every day. It is a mere trickle now.” I love her closing line: “Everything comes to those who wait. Or, in this case, doesn’t come any more.”
A recent article by Mike Kraus, a business columnist for Allbusiness.com, concludes by saying: “Get on the wagon to listen to your customers’ needs when it comes to direct marketing (and everything else).”
This is Mike’s second article about the business perspective on junk mail in an article titled Junk Mail Be Gone. Mike provides other sage advice that I hope more direct marketers will reflect on as they develop their direct marketing strategies for 2009. Mike states:
1. Consumer backlash continues to grow as direct marketers ignore their wishes. I, for one, continue to work to reduce junk mail whenever possible and continue to grow increasingly frustrated with retailers that ignore my wishes. I don’t own a pet and I don’t want to get your pet catalog no matter what my demographic profile is. And your catalog geared toward women’s clothes isn’t relevant to me either.
2. Consumers are greener than ever. Retailers that ignore consumers’ wishes to be removed from their lists are viewed as non-green in their efforts, choosing capitalism over the environment. Citibank take note: I do not want to earn up to 25,000 miles with a Citibank/American Airlines credit card, so stop sending me your weekly direct mail!
….
So here are a couple ideas to maximize your efforts:
1. If you’re going to advertise in val-pack, or any number of similar coupon packs, ask them for data about how many consumers are opting out of receiving their mailers in the zip codes you’re targeting on websites like the ones listed above. You may find that more and more of your target demographic doesn’t want to receive those mailers, thereby wasting your marketing dollars.
2. Most retailers sign people up for email at their stores, which has an easy opt-out function in every email. Try to do the same for direct mail. Create a sign up list or form that asks them to check a box for each type of communication they’d like to receive (or not). These days, most people just opt for email because it’s quick and easy (to write when they’re signing up and to unsubscribe when they dont’ want to receive it anymore). But doing a check against your database when they’re checking out just to confirm they still want to receive mail will help cull your list down and save your money in the long-run. You can even explain that this is another effort to make your company more green.
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!
This morning I read the New York Times Saturday Interview with Mike Critelli, Pitney Bowes Executive Chairman. The title of the interview is In Defense of that Daily Visitor, Unsolicited Mail. You can read the entire interview here. As I read this Q&A article, it became clear that Mike is not expressing views consistent with 21st century realities. Mike’s defense of unsolicited mail is essentially that alternative forms of marketing, such as email, also consume natural resources. Where I come from, two wrongs don’t make a right. Where the Catalog Choice community comes from, respecting customers’ mail preferences are paramount.
I was especially taken back by Mike’s answer to the following question:
Q. Do you think some Americans like to get unsolicited mail?
A. Absolutely. Americans have been buying from catalogs for over a century. The original unsolicited catalogs that people got, particularly in rural areas, were from Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward and J. C. Penney. They started the direct mail industry over a century ago.
Mike – in just one year over 1 million consumers have made over 14 million requests for unwanted catalogs to no longer be mailed to them here at Catalog Choice. Mike has is own blog where you can let him know your opinion on this topic. His blog is titled Open Mike. Head on over to Mike’s blog to share your views on the topic of unsolicted mail.
This weekend one of our team members received their Room & Board catalog. We noticed the message printed on the back of the catalog informing receiptents that they can go to Catalog Choice to opt-out of the catalog mailing. This is another way how our free service benefits merchants. They don’t need to build a service to accept opt-out requests – they can just point their customers to our free service. No more phone calls to customer service just to opt-out. It is free and easy across the board. Sorry for the fuzzy image. If you click the image it will open in a new browser window and you can read the text they used.
We are working on some standard language and a logo that will fit neatly on the back of the catalog. Until then, feel free to use our mailbox logo or just text as Room & Board has done.
Sam Meers wrote a clear and concise post about Catalog Choice over at his blog “Smoke & Meers”.
Sam states in his post titled A Win/Win/Win:
There are lots of benefits to this idea. First, it just makes sense. If people don’t want a catalog, then they shouldn’t receive it. It will either go in the trash or, if we’re lucky, get recycled, which uses energy that would have never have been needed if the catalog had never been produced and mailed in the first place.
But the thing I love about this idea is that it puts the decision in the hands of the consumer, not the company. And because it is done so well, both the consumer and the company benefit. Consumers get only the catalogs they desire and companies don’t waste money and natural resources sending a catalog to people who will only throw it away.
They call this site “Catalog Choice.” But it’s really “Consumer Choice.” Consumers win. Marketers win. The environment wins. Even the Post Office wins. I doubt all those postal carriers want to lug around all those catalogs and deliver them to people who are just going to throw them away.
I raise my glass and toast the founders. Well done!
Sam – our glasses are raised to you, thanks!
Catalog Choice Team
