Carry on addressing

We think we’ve found the hardest working carrier sheets out there—and possibly the laziest.

A catalogue from Agriframes landed on our doormat in mid-January with a carrier sheet featuring no fewer than three different offers. The first was a £10 gift voucher awarded if we spent £200, the second was a monthly draw to win a £100 voucher by sending in photos of our garden and the third offer was a thermometer, “worth £10.99” if we placed our order before 30th April.

But while the carrier sheet worked hard to persuade us to spend, the catalogue’s cover was unassuming: an image of a woman and child walking under a gothic pergola that linked to its “Guaranteed for a Generation” tagline. We’d have liked to see at least one of the offers promoted on the cover. We’d also have liked a bit of colour on the carrier sheet too.

Making even more of the carrier sheet is the Happy Puzzle Company. Whereas Agriframes printed its address sheet in mono, the Happy Puzzle Company opted for full-colour. Received in time for Christmas, this festive example was packed with special offers and useful information. There was a choice of free gift—with illustrations. There were also details of last-order deadlines for guaranteed Christmas delivery and a reassuring note that the Happy Puzzle Company are product experts here to help us make the best purchasing decision.

In the b-to-b sector, we liked this example from retail supplies cataloguer Morplan. Technically this isn’t a carrier sheet; the address is printed on the cover and a separate sheet is overlaid with a cutout for the address to show through, but it serves the same purpose. Again, a promotion is the most prominent feature—in this case a prize draw to win £1,000 to spend at Morplan.

Another b-to-b marketer, ESE Direct, uses the carrier sheet to display its award-winning status, its high customer satisfaction score and its low prices.

The carrier sheet is a premium spot to make some last-minute promotions or encourage impulse buying. It’s another chance to help your catalogue stand out from the rest of the mail. It’s also a useful way of segmenting offers for different buyers, and can save money on potentially costly personalised catalogue covers. There’s really no excuse not to make the most of this prime real estate. So isn’t is just slightly ironic that a manufacturer of flags and customised signage displays no creativity on its carrier sheet at all?--MT

 

The good, the bad, and the huh?

A few comments on catalogues and emails that arrived at Catalogue e-business HQ this week.

First, the good: “Do we look good naked?” retail supplies cataloguer Morplan asks on the inside front cover of its October issue. It had mailed the catalogue without a plastic wrap, you see. “Did your copy arrive in good condition or should we stay covered up” the note continues. “Please let us know at naked@morplan.com.” I like this for two reasons: 1) Mailing without a polybag is more environmentally friendly, and 2) Morplan is asking for customers’ feedback on the move. Much as I loathe when catalogues come entombed in plastic (it’s just more flotsam to rip open and discard), I can appreciate that not everyone agrees with me. By asking its clients for feedback, Morplan shows that it values their input and, by extension, their custom.

Next, the bad: “We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated The Wanderers (Bloomsbury Classic Reads) by Richard Price have also purchased Rays by Richard Price,” begins an email from Amazon.co.uk. The message includes a link to Rays, which is scheduled to be released next week, and suggests I preorder a copy. Now, if Rays has not yet been published, how could people have already bought it? And more to the point, the Richard Price who wrote The Wanderers, a gritty novel (and one that I gave four stars, by the way), is not the same Richard Price who wrote Rays, a book of poetry described as “a wry and tender lover’s gift”. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of readers of Richard Price I and Richard Price II, the circles probably wouldn’t even touch, let alone overlap. I’d complained about Amazon’s dodgy product recommendations before; this seems to confirm that while it owns leagues of customer and product data, Amazon doesn’t really know what all the info means.

And now, the huh?: A 20-page Christmas edition of the Viking Direct catalogue includes two pages of Wii games, two pages of additional games, a page of kiddie electronics, and a page of DVDs. Viking, of course, is a direct seller of office supplies. Is the company really suggesting that office managers should stock up on boxed sets of Shameless DVDs and Hannah Montana karaoke systems in addition to wall planners and toner cartridges?--SC

The August Catalogue Log

The dog days of summer made their presence felt in the Catalogue Log inbox. In August we logged in just 71 catalogues, less than half the number (149) tallied in July. How much of the decline in volume was due to general seasonality and how much to the Royal Mail strikes scattered across the month is impossible to say.

While the overall volume of catalogues was low, the percentage offering sales and discounts was the highest it’s been so far in 2009: 43.7 percent. That’s not surprising, given that many retailers, particularly apparel merchants, make every effort to shift excess inventory by the end of summer to make room for autumn and Christmas merchandise. Cataloguers as diverse as Furniture@work.co.uk, footwear merchant Hotter Comfort Concept, retail fittings supplier Morplan, womenswear title Simply Be, and Wickedelic Lingerie posted special sale catalogues in August.

In fact, the percentage of catalogues that promised no special offers fell sharply. In June, 46.5 percent of the books logged in carried no free P&P offers, gift-with-purchase deals, prize draws, discounts, or other special offers. In July the percentage slipped slightly, to 43.6 percent. But in August fewer than one in three of the catalogues received—31 percent, to be precise—were free of sales or other promotions. For the most part, those were autumn/winter/Christmas editions, such as the Arthritis Research Campaign’s Christmas issue, the autumn editions of childrenwear merchant Frugi, gardening title Sarah Raven’s Kitchen & Garden, and womenswear brand Spirit of the Andes , upscale knitwear mailer House of Bruar’s 2009-2010 catalogue, and the autumn/winter editions from fair-trade fashion brand People Tree and apparel brand Weird Fish.

Peeks, which sells party and fundraising supplies, did include a special offer in its Christmas catalogue: a discount on early-bird orders. It didn’t call out the promotion on its cover, though, opting to feature it on the opening spread instead—a bit of a missed opportunity.--SC