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.

A.D.R. Bulbs

Amana Meat Shop & Smokehouse

Cambria Cove

Casual Living

Central Restaurant Products

Chadwicks

eBags

ForestEthics

Hitchcock Shoes

Ibex Outdoor Clothing

Knife Cave

MOMA Design Store

Metrostyle

National Wildlife Federation

NapaStyle

Photography By Nadine

Real Goods Solar

Ross Simons

Smoky Mountain Knife Works

Soft Surroundings

The Sharper Image

Ulla Popken

If your company uses direct mail, you should be honoring consumer choices at Catalog Choice. Learn more about our free merchant account program here.

• 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.

Art Supply Warehouse Express

CWI Medical

Famous Smoke Shop

Fort Western

Impromptu Gourmet

Jerry’s Artarama

Paper Wishes by Hot Off the Press

If your company uses direct mail, you should be honoring consumer choices at Catalog Choice. Learn more about our free merchant account program here.

Here is how it works.  Log into your Catalog Choice account.  All of your activity messages are shown right on your  “Dashboard”.  Messages that require action on your part are in the seciton highlighted in red.

By selecting “Respond”, you can write a message to the mailer giving them the additional information requested.  We will track the status of your response the same way we track your original opt-out request.  You know the familiar “unconfirmed”, “delivered”, and “confirmed” labels.

Did you know that you can receive all the activity messages from a mailer directly to your personal email address?  Your email settings may be updated by going to My Profile.  You can access My Profile from the login strip at the top of the page or go to your “Dashboard” tab and select “My Profile”.

Here is the magic part.  If the activity message is delivered to your personal email and you reply, the response will be sent to the mailer from your unique Catalog Choice email address as well.  So, when we say we never release your email address, we mean it.

Need proof that you sent them the information they requested?  Your response is automatically saved in your Catalog Choice account for future reference.

With the completion of the Needs More Information system, we have the most transparent, straight forward mail preference service in the Nation.  Catalog Choice is facilitating a round trip a communication between you and mailers to decrease the amount of unwanted mail that shows up in your mailbox!  And did we mention that we do this without releasing your email address?

The CCC requires that you notify consumers of the opportunity to modify or eliminate future mail solicitations.

The DMA’s CCC launched shortly after Catalog Choice in late 2007.  It originally gave marketers 12 months to comply.  They increased the phase in period to 24 months – October 2009.

There are four specific elements of the CCC that everyone should be aware of:

1. A marketer should proivde existing and prospective customers and donors with notice of an opportunity to eliminate or modify direct mail solicitations from their organization. It effects consumer and nonprofit mailers.  The notice should:
   Appear in every marketing offer and be easy to read, find, understand, act upon.
2. Upon request by a consumer, a marketer should disclose the source from which it obtained personally identifiable data about that consumer.
3. Use the DMA’s Mail Preference Service file on a monthly basis.
4. A marketer should establish internal policies and practices in support of the CCC.  Specifically, a senior level executive should be responsible for making sure that your organization implements its policies and practices, and reviews and updates them as necessary.

If your company does not have a spot on your website where you can refer consumers to in order to set their mail preference, you should consider Catalog Choice’s new hosted Contact Preference Center.  Learn more about our solution.  If you want to offer opt-down options rather than just opt-out, we can make that happen.  If you want to sending the consumer somewhere other than your privacy policy to set their mail preference, we have a solution for you.

Calyx Flowers

Crystal Classics

Go Ahead Tours

Home Decorator’s Collection

J. Jill

Otis S. Twilley Seed Co.

PajamaGram

Tracy Porter

Van’s Gifts

Vermont Teddy Bear

Wild Horsefeathers

To add new logins, go to Edit Profile and add a new login. It only takes a second.

We were thrilled to see this statement in Room & Board’s Privacy Policy:

“We love to send you our annual catalog but only if you want it. Because of that, we’ve joined Catalog Choice, an organization that lets consumers indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive. If you would prefer to not receive our catalogs in the postal mail, or if you are receiving extra copies that you do not need, please visit catalogchoice.org.”

Room and Board has also printed a version of this statement on the back of their catalog.

John Schroeder, Business Intelligence Manager for Room & Board, has this to say about the service:

“We love CatalogChoice.org! It is a perfect fit with our overall philosophy of sustainability and respecting our consumers’ wishes on how we engage them throughout the year. With our web site becoming a more frequently used tool it only makes sense that customers have the option of their preferred method of engagement with our company. Catalog Choice is one of the many ways we capture this. Thank you Catalog Choice for your services!”

Thank you, Room & Board. We hope other catalog mailers follow your lead!

We figure that providing merchants with new digital marketing tools gives them one more reason to collaborate with us and honor our member’s mail preference requests.  We’ve learned that you can not push merchants away from paper marketing tools, you need to provide compelling alternatives.

Look for more exciting announcements and new features leveraging our new catalog widgets in the coming weeks.