PRESIDENT'S CORNER Ten minutes later, out she came. She explained that she had replaced the frames on both of my glasses because even the second one was "not quite right" anymore. She not only cleaned the glasses, but replaced a lens on mine and on my wife's because she "detected some little scratches." We asked what we owed. The answer? NOTHING. She explained that Maui Jim's stands for quality and satisfied customers. Wow! Satisfied we were and loyal forever, too! I could not help contrasting this experience with one I recently had with Amazon.com, a company that I generally think to be on the cutting edge of e-commerce… Read on…FEATURE ARTICLE CASE STUDY CIRCULATION TIP CREATIVE TIP multichannel TIP CLIENT HIGHLIGHT—PAPO D'ANJO EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT—JUDE HOFFNER DATABASE STRATEGIES NEWS BRIEF
PRESIDENT'S CORNER While traveling to Maui this week for a relaxing vacation, I discovered that my brand new sunglasses were demolished in my briefcase. By good fortune, they were Maui Jim's! I learned that Maui Jim's is headquartered right in Lahaina and have a repair facility. So, my wife and I walked in the front door to be greeted by a charming receptionist who called repairs. Out came another friendly employee who not only took my broken pair of sunglasses, but observed that both my wife's Maui Jim's and the pair I was wearing needed cleaning. She asked us to take a seat. Ten minutes later, out she came. She explained that she had replaced the frames on both of my glasses because even the second one was "not quite right" anymore. She not only cleaned the glasses, but replaced a lens on mine and on my wife's because she "detected some little scratches." We asked what we owed. The answer? NOTHING. She explained that Maui Jim's stands for quality and satisfied customers. Wow! Satisfied we were and will be loyal to Maui Jim's forever! I could not help contrasting this experience with one I recently had with Amazon.com, a company that I generally think to be on the cutting edge of e-commerce. I purchased a Panasonic telephone system for my home that had several components. As it turned out, each of the components was sent from a different Amazon affiliate vendor that had the "best price." Unfortunately, it turned out that not all the components were compatible—something that I discovered during the following two months. When I went to return them, I learned that each of the companies had different return policies and most would not take the products back because over 30 days had elapsed! I was stuck with a very expensive and time consuming problem. Will I shop at Amazon again? Maybe—but only for a book. I did much shopping this past holiday season on the internet. What a contrast to the warm and fuzzy feeling I received at Maui Jim's compared to my experience with Amazon. While my shopping experiences were efficient, almost none of the websites communicated anything about the company’s brand or customer-centric service policies. By and large, the communications I received after the purchase were minimal and/or utilitarian, such as an invoice or shipping notification. There was absolutely no attempt to give these companies a human face or make me feel like an important customer. During this past year, LENSER has conducted a number of brand reviews for our clients. This effort, primarily led by Carol Worthington-Levy, our partner addressing creative and customer communication issues, has reviewed every touch point that our clients have with a customer. This has included their catalogs, websites, emails, and collateral materials. We discovered many missed opportunities to communicate their brand and service-oriented policies to their customers. We find that this is very often the result of responsibility for the brand and "company persona" identity being even further divided with increased e-marketing. Those who create the catalog are very often different from the creative team for the website who are different from those managing email, etc. There are too many uncoordinated "cooks in the kitchen." As we all move more toward true "convergent channel marketing" in recognizing that our customers are impacted by all of our channels at the same time, we need to step back and fully appreciate the experience our customers are having. How are you communicating the key benefits of doing business with your company as opposed to that of your competition? If all you are communicating is price and "free shipping", your brand image will be no better than the unknown companies that pop to the top of comparative shopping sites such as PriceGrabber. You will end up with low value one time buyers as opposed to customers. The challenge is how to duplicate the warm, human experience I just had with Maui Jim's in every customer touch point in your company. I suggest that you begin a review process to assure that you are taking advantage of every opportunity to communicate your brand to your customers. This process needs to be on-going and, in most cases, be led by the CEO. Someone needs to be on top of making the decisions to assure that all of the players are singing from the same song sheet. LENSER partners are ready of be of assistance to you in guiding this critical process.FEATURE ARTICLE The start of the New Year is a time for looking back to the past, and more importantly, forward to the coming year. It's a time to reflect on the changes we want (or need) to make and resolve to follow through on those changes. Most people make personal New Year’s resolutions, but few take a hard look at their company and make business resolutions. The following are my top ten business resolutions you should make in 2008.
CASE STUDY Are those orders represented in the 20% - 35% “unmatched” bucket truly unmatched, though? LENSER employed CognitiveDATA recently to help one of our more catalog-focused clients answer this question. A premier service bureau had already performed a standard response matchback. Using simple merge-purge character match processing, which is typical for most service bureaus when asked to perform response matchback projects, just 72% of the order records were exact matches, leaving 28% unmatched and unallocated. The mail and responder files were then sent to CognitiveDATA for a pass through their CDLink persistent key identification process. CDLink, if you are wondering, is part of the Customer Data Integration technology that CognitiveDATA uses for its IntelliDRESS address hygiene product. A robust data repository is utilized to accurately identify duplicate individuals, in spite of variances and permutations in the name and / or address fields. Here’s an excellent example of how it works:
Typical response matchbacks, depending on the quality of the character match logic, may not identify these two records as matches, however, CDLink essentially guarantees it will. The data in CDLink is able to discern with high confidence levels that Elizabeth Allen is indeed Beth Allen-Snyder and that 124 W Oak St is the only address match for 124 Oak Dr. Back to our case study, though: by using CDLink, the company was able improve their match rate by 32%. The chart below illustrates the pre-CDLink match rate vs. the CDLink match rate.
Interestingly enough, the newly-found matched orders originated almost entirely from catalog source codes, as opposed to organic web traffic, which is where most of us would have guessed they came from. Without the use of CDLink, marketing management would have made ill-informed decisions on the performance of their catalog mailing by misallocating 21% of sales. For most companies, the value of this information more than covers the additional cost of running response matchbacks via CognitiveDATA.CIRCULATION TIP These names can behave quite differently than your typical buyers. Many times they will not perform as well as a 12-month buyer, but in some instances they can outperform older buyers and requestors. Remember, these are folks who have received a package from your company. If they had a positive experience, they will be more inclined to order from you than a company they have had no experience with whatsoever. If you have the volume and the ability to flag the giftees, it makes sense to segment them in their own group and track their performance. It gives you yet another option when developing your spring mailing strategy. You may want to segment gift card and gift certificate recipients separately, as well. And don’t forget to promote your giftees next fall—if they liked the gift they received, they may want to purchase with you for their gift-giving.CREATIVE TIP It’s tempting to jump in with both feet by making alterations to your logo or masthead, or create a big anniversary-themed ‘red carpet’ opening spread to reflect this excitement. But truth be told, you are far more excited about your anniversary than your customers are. And in fact, unless you make it a celebration through activities that are beneficial to the customer, it’s much ado about very little as far as they are concerned. Consider how much history you have hanging on your logo or masthead and you may see why I don’t recommend your changing your logo. I have never seen anything positive come out of a logo change in honor of an anniversary, and it always becomes a source of more work—and expense—than it’s worth. Try something smaller and you’ll get a lot more impact. For example, you can create a small banner for the base of your cover that says “Celebrating XX Years” to make it more special. But keep in mind, if you announce a celebration, that event must be supported or it is a non-event. To support an anniversary and make it something memorable for the customer, you can promote it in different ways that will create excitement. After all, your anniversary is ONLY a benefit to your customers if you make it beneficial to them. Here’s some perspective: to your customers, you are the same company they’ve been buying from so just the announcement of the date only muddies the water. And for prospects there is less and less concern among customers about how long a company has been around. This being the case, why would your anniversary be important to them? How could you make it meaningful? If you have a gift catalog, you could try a special limited edition of some product you already have, like a candle with a date and some heartfelt sentiment, or a special ‘reprint’ of a favorite item. If you have seeds or plants perhaps you can work to develop your own special anniversary rose or flower. If you have apparel you could develop a special limited edition shirt or jacket that has a certain panache your customers will appreciate. But if you never develop your own product, what then? Try one of these:
multichannel TIP CLIENT HIGHLIGHT—PAPO D'ANJO Recognizing an underserved market in the U.S. for high quality European style clothing, Mrs. Monteiro de Barros set out to fill the gap by creating beautifully designed children’s apparel of the finest cotton and wool textiles. The pieces are produced in Portugal by hand, using techniques and experience passed on through the centuries in the back alleys of Lisbon. The result is a luxury line of clothing that has had a devoted following since Papo D’Anjo’s inception in 1994. Having built the business primarily through select retailers and trunk shows, Papo D’Anjo engaged LENSER to help launch a catalog in 2005 with a goal of extending its reach in the marketplace. What a success it has been! The catalog’s fine photography and exceptional quality succeed in conveying the luxury brand message. And as Michelle Farabaugh and Jude Hoffner, Papo D’Anjo’s marketing team at LENSER, can attest, the market is responding. “I’ve been very impressed with how the company has embraced the direct to consumer business model, and adapted its operations to meet the obvious demand in the U.S. marketplace. Papo’s business metrics reflect a customer base that recognizes quality in children’s apparel, is responsive to the presentation of exceptional merchandise, and values the very personal relationship that the company delivers,” says Jude. For her part, Michelle has been impressed with the company’s execution across multiple channels. “Moving into the catalog and on-line channels can be such a challenge in today’s crowded marketplace because the financial model allows so little room for error. Papo D’Anjo’s team operates in the U.S. and in Portugal, and that adds a layer of complexity that most companies are ill-equipped to manage well at the start. In my view, Papo D’Anjo owes much of its success to a great balance of superb merchandise, deft entrepreneurialism, and nimble management that has executed its multichannel marketing strategy very well. It’s a delight when LENSER engages with clients like Papo D’Anjo.” Papo D’Anjo is preparing to launch their Spring/Summer 2008 line right now. The LENSER family eagerly anticipates another successful season, and a year of continually reaching new heights working together with Papo D’Anjo. To learn more about Papo D’Anjo and see their lovely clothes, please go to www.papodanjo.com.EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT—JUDE HOFFNER His friend’s advice was, “Nice idea, kid. How about trying a normal job first?” So Jude took a job for on-the-job training by working for his agency and notes, “I never did follow up on the radio station plan, but more than a decade later I owe many of my direct marketing chops to the opportunity that family friend provided.” After seven years, Jude was looking for professional exposure beyond non-profit organizations and came to LENSER from a recommendation of a co-worker. After their initial meeting, Michelle Houston, Vice President at LENSER notes, “Our initial impression was that Jude is extremely intelligent, thoughtful, and mature beyond his years—and those skills would lend well to our family of clients.” And those beliefs have borne true with Jude’s rapid promotions as Michelle continues, “Jude’s innate curiosity and sharing of that knowledge has been critical in training many of the new staff and taking on very difficult and complex projects.” With those skills on hand, Jude was promoted last year to Director of Business to Consumer Markets and is launching LENSER’s e-Commerce solutions. For Jude, the most enjoyable aspect of working at LENSER is the diversity of experience, in every facet of the phrase, as he notes, “Our clients’ businesses are extremely diverse, our clients’ personalities span a wonderfully diverse spectrum of humanity, LENSER’s leadership provides a great diversity of experience to both clients and staff, and my coworkers bring a dizzying array of personal interests and professional acumen to bear every day. We’ve been fortunate to create and maintain what I think is an enviable workplace environment, but it doesn’t come by accident and it starts at the top.” As expected, Jude’s hobbies are diverse, too, and include hiking, camping, cooking, reading, lamenting today’s radio programming, and as he closes, “Trying to get my daughter to say Dada before she says Mama. Even a pyrrhic victory is still a victory!” To learn more about Jude, please visit his bio.DATABASE STRATEGIES Unfortunately, even today, many still rely on flat file databases and simple RFM segmentation, yet most of those databases are not set up to handle the demands and requirements of the increasingly competitive and complicated multichannel marketplace, let alone incorporate address updates and consolidation. Some cannot even drive both traditional list selection and ecommerce campaigns. And with over 50% of direct orders coming in through the internet, accurate keycode capture for multichannel response analysis is like trying to decipher a “connect the dots” picture without the benefit of pen or pencil. So what are the options open to savvy direct marketers? Some companies have the resources to develop a sophisticated customer relational database that will allow them to not only market smarter and target better by using a full range of customer data to optimize their contact strategy, track individual promotion history, and reliably update address information and record consolidation, but to accurately access response data and allocate resources accordingly. For many, this has become essential not only for their growth, but to their very survival. LENSER is committed to the success of its clients—all of its clients—and until recently, such sophisticated databases have been beyond the reach of many. In recognizing the critical need to have a satisfactory database to properly segment customers in ways that optimize both multichannel contact strategies and multichannel response analysis, we were inspired to develop an option that would be accessible to everyone. Our goal in this became to put forward a complete solution that is affordable with a clear and immediate return on investment, not only for our valued clients, but other knowing direct marketers. We partnered with a premier database management company to build a single database platform environment and to consolidate processes that marketers previously had spread over different systems and with different vendors. LENSER’s Database Solution is based on bringing the housefile database, merge purge, and matchbacks all under the same roof so that data can be efficiently moved between the processes and appended to the database. By allowing participants to share a platform, develop standard data fields common to most, and provide the necessary human interface between participants and the database, we have obtained economies of scale and features that are well beyond what most could economically afford to achieve on their own. What are the unique features that go well beyond the traditional flat file database?
In addition to the marketing database, the LENSER Database Query System (DQS) can provide fast answers to marketing questions by providing response information without having to develop a custom reporting solution, keeping costs down. At LENSER, we are constantly looking toward the future and developing new ideas to improve our clients’ multichannel marketing efforts. We would like to be part of an ongoing dialogue with you to determine how to best meet your needs with cutting-edge multichannel marketing concepts and technology. To learn more about the LENSER Database Solution, please contact Michelle Houston, Vice President of Circulation and Client Services, at 415.446.2504 or email .NEWS BRIEF
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