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!
