Christmas covers 2011

Christmas is a time of traditions and in the Direct Commerce office one of my favourites is the Christmas covers blog post. Although most of the catalogues received in the run up to Christmas were taken to ECMOD on 30th November, I kept a few favourites in a secret drawer until I was ready to reveal this year’s top four. And they are...

1. Continuing with the spirit of tradition, here’s a catalogue cover that could have been produced in the mid-20th century. Is that a good or a bad thing? You decide. For us in the Direct Commerce office, this cover from The Original Gift Company encapsulates Christmas—creeping down the stairs to check whether Santa’s been, a beautifully decorated tree with presents galore—all from The Original Gift Catalogue, I assume. I like the tagline too: “Delivering the magic of Christmas”, which works on a number of levels. Finally, remembering that a catalogue has to do more than just look appealing, the cover carries a message that gift personalisation is free and sets out the last-order dates to reassure customers that The Original Gift Company really has thought of everything. 

2. The Little White Company caught my attention purely because of the little girl whispering to the little boy. I like to imagine what they’re talking about. My favourites are “that big stocking’s mine” or “I’ve got more presents than you”, but we’ve had lots of fun coming up with other captions. I also like the set The White Company created for its cover and how it effortlessly hints at everything a customer can find inside, from furniture to rugs, from giant stockings to childrenswear. 

3. The Scarlett Willow mailer arrived early in the season to announce that the Christmas boutique was now open. It was a favourite right from the start—I love the snowflake motif and the twinkly lights creating a flare effect on the cover; I like the simplicity of the propping—a silver spoon, a paper placeholder; I also like the tableware specialist’s emphasis on personalisation and the call to action to see the whole range online. The mailer only has eight pages to capture the imagination, but it gets it spot on. There were stocking fillers, kids’ gifts, best sellers and personalisation ideas. As a driver to encourage me to visit the Scarlett Willow website, this definitely succeeded.

4. The Christmas wildcard comes courtesy of gardening supplies cataloguer Wiggly Wigglers. This cover certainly made me stop and think: What’s a bull got to do with Christmas? What’s so special about this bull? Who is Trojan Fred? What does he have to do with Wiggly Wigglers? I feel like an outsider stumbling on a private joke. Do existing Wiggly customers already know Trojan Fred’s story and I don’t? I’ve scanned the catalogue from cover to cover to try and find out more, but failed. However, despite a frustrating front cover, the Wiggly Christmas catalogue does a lot right. There’s a special offer on the cover that encourages customers to spend more than £40 on their order and I love its “why buy Wiggly” spread on pages 4 to 5, which has some very convincing reasons to shop at Wiggler Wigglers. Also, I fear that if I say no, Trojan Fred might come after me.

I can’t end this post without a mention for my favourite back cover. While the males in the office would probably disagree, I much prefer the back cover of the Figleaves catalogue. The front seems the obvious choice—a seminaked woman. The back cover took a little more thought, fairy lights and baubles instead of a log fire, stockings hanging from the mantelpiece and a selection of gift boxes either side of the fireplace. It has a more Christmassy feel. But like I said, I’m sure at least half the population would disagree.--MT

  

June Catalogue Log

Talk about extremes. The June Catalogue Log recorded the highest ever percentage of catalogues offering a sale or discount on the cover, while also logging one of the lowest numbers of covers promising free delivery.

The summer sales started in earnest in June. Out of 81 catalogues received last month, 59.3 percent, or 48 catalogues, offered a sale or discount on the front cover. Further, only 29 catalogues had no offer on the cover at all—and of those, at least two had a special offer flyer inserted, or promoted a deal on the back cover. Clearly, cataloguers are being more aggressive in their promotional mail in order to boost revenues and shift stock in time for autumn.  But, this tactic comes at a price; at multititle group N Brown, which operates Simply Be, Jacamo, The Shoe Tailor and Marisota, for example, margin in the 18 weeks ended 2nd July declined by 0.2 percent due to discounting. Indeed, of 11 N Brown catalogues and inserts we’ve logged in just the past two months, all had promotional cover lines.
Up until now, July 2010 had been the most sales-dominated month, with 49.5 percent of covers promoting a discount--significantly lower than 2011’s 59.3 percent. For June 2010, 40 percent of covers featured a sale. The year before, discounting was even less popular, with only 34.1 percent of covers promising special prices in June. Does this signal that the sale season is starting earlier every year? Seems so; Marks & Spencer reportedly brought forward its sale by a fortnight this year, fuelling speculation that it was doing it to avoid losing business to other retailers, who were already discounting.

Evidently though, one offer is enough for June’s cataloguers. In a distant second place, the next most popular offer was free delivery, offered by a mere 10 catalogues, or 12.3 percent. This is broadly in line with last year (14.7 percent) and more than June 2009 (8.5 percent). I can only assume that as margins are taking such a hit due to slashed prices, retailers cannot afford to send the goods for free too. Of the catalogues that did offer free shipping, most did so conditionally, for example, free delivery for orders of £100 or more at audio-visual cabling cataloguer Russ Andrews, or free p&p when you shop online at Simply Supplements. Among the more generous offers we noted was a Wiggly Wigglers insert with our order from childrenswear brand Frugi—it featured a 15 percent discount and free delivery to encourage me to place my first order there.
The third most popular offer in June was a free gift with purchase, promoted by 9.8 percent of catalogue covers. This is lower than last year’s 12.8 percent, and significantly lower than June 2009 when we logged 17.8 percent of covers offering a freebie as a thank-you for buying in June.

Our first Catalogue Log blog post was published in June 2009, since then we've learned that:

• To date, 2011 has had the highest percentage of catalogues promoting a sale or discount, with an average of 46.1 percent of catalogues doing so every month.
  
• Free delivery was most popular in 2010, offered on average by 1 in 5 catalogues per month.
  
• Offering a free gift with purchase is normally a staple promotion on b-to-b catalogue covers. So far in 2011, an average 13.8 percent of catalogues a month feature a freebie on their front cover.
  
• Free shipping is not a popular offer in June.
  
• The most promotional month to date, offering a combination of sales, free p&p or free gifts, was February 2011, when more than two-thirds of catalogues featured some sort of special offer on the cover.
  
• We received an average of 125 catalogues a month in 2009 and 111 catalogues a month in 2010.
  
• In the first six months of 2011 we logged a monthly average of 108 catalogues.
  
• Overall, in terms of volume, we tracked 81 catalogues in June 2010, that’s 8 percent more than last year (75 catalogues), but 42 percent less than June 2009 (140 catalogues).--MT

February Catalogue Log

More than two-thirds of all the catalogues we received and logged during February 2011 featured some sort of special offer on the cover. That makes February the most promotional of the past 12 months. Up until now, the honour belonged to August 2010, when 65.6 percent of the front covers we tracked mentioned a sale, discount, free shipping, or free gift offer.

In February 2011, we noted a rise in each type of promotion tracked. Almost half of the covers featured a sale or discount—49 percent, compared with 44 percent in January. Among those touting a sale were promotional products marketer 4imprint, angling supplies catalogue Fishtec, and shirt maker Charles Tyrwhitt, which used inserts and mailings to promote its latest deals. In fact, we received three Charles Tyrwhitt catalogues in February, one with an offer for Sunday Times readers, one with an offer for Lands’ End customers and a third carrying the rather curious offer code of Elliot.

Free delivery was the second most popular offer, with 22 percent of catalogues promoting free shipping on the cover. That’s up from 16 percent in January, but only marginally ahead of December, and behind September’s crop of catalogues, which saw the highest percentage of catalogues promoting free delivery, 24.3 percent. Some merchants, like Boden, Figleaves, Healthspan, and Hotter Shoes, combined free delivery with a price-related promotion for an even better deal for customers.

Also on the up was the popularity of free gifts. Eighteen percent of the covers we tracked featured a free gift with purchase, including gardening supplies business Wiggly Wigglers, which gave away three bars of Divine chocolate with orders of £30 or more. It’s the highest percentage we’ve seen for several months, up from 16 percent in January and three times more what we logged in December.

Now compare this with February 2010 and you’ll find stark contrasts: Last year we only received 89 catalogues during February, and promotions were down across the gamut of offers we track. What conclusions can be drawn from this? Does increased volume herald a strengthening of the sector? Are mailers confidently investing in upping circulation to lift response? On the other hand, does a more promotional approach indicate that direct sellers are focusing on sales in expense of margin? All thoughts welcome.--MT

Egg on its face

I loved this cover of the Wiggly Wigglers catalogue at first. It had a touch of the metaphysical about it—a chicken looking at a chicken-shaped basket full of eggs, itself a basket full of eggs-to-be.

On closer look, however, the chicken isn’t all there. If you zoom in on the chicken’s feet, one of them is transparent. So much for contemplating your place in the world.--MT

ECMOD quickies

One drawback of attending a conference with an especially good programme of sessions and speakers: There’s no way to cover everything you want to. Such was the case at ECMOD this year. Nonetheless, here’s a selection of notable quotes and quick takeaways that I’ve gleaned fromt the conference, which began yesterday and ran through today at Earls Court in London:

• “The successful catalogues we work with focus on having a website better than their catalogue,” said Bill LaPierre of list and data firm Direct Media/Millard during his Thursday morning session. This ties in with one of his truisms of direct marketing in the 21st century: The website is the core business, and the catalogue brings in incremental sales—the reverse of the longstanding conventional wisdom.

• Also from LaPierre: Sixty percent of the success of a catalogue is down to the merchandise, 20 percent to the mailing list, 10 percent to the creative, and the remaining 10 percent to customer service.

• In addition to helping ecommerce sites with their search engine optimisation efforts (by providing more content for search engine spiders to crawl), a blog “kind of builds a personal trust, as people want more and more information about companies these days,” Karen Watson, co-owner and managing director of The Real Flower Company, said during a Wednesday morning session on social media.

• At the same session, Wiggly Wigglers founder Heather Gorringe said, “Podcasts aren’t always thought of as social media, but I actually think they’re the start of it all.” Wiggly Wigglers has had great success with its folksy yet informative podcasts, as well as with other social media. Facebook, for instance, drives about 7.5 percent of all traffic to the rural-lifestyle cataloguer’s website, and Twitter drives another 7.5 percent. Of Twitter, Gorringe said, “It puts us on an even platform with companies that have an enormous budget.”

• Another panelist of the Wednesday morning social-media session, Asos’s James Hart, said, “Your community is not just your customers. Your community is you and your customers.”

• Discussing his company’s launch in the US market during a session on UK brands expanding overseas, Boden managing director Julian Granville noted, “In the US we planned for just about every disaster scenario there is, but we didn’t plan on this much success.” The message: Just as you should have contingency plans for underperformance, be sure you are prepared for greater-than-expected demand.

• Think “free” is the most effective word you can use in an email subject line? Think again. In her Thursday afternoon session, Michelle Farabaugh of consultancy Lenser said that of the emails her company had tested, seven of the 10 most-effective ones had “New” in the subject line.

I’ll be posting more-extensive coverage of ECMOD on our Catalogue e-business website (www.catalog-biz.com) and in the November issue of Catalogue e-business magazine—once my brain cells have processed everything and, just as important, once my feet have forgiven me for wearing court shoes two days in a row for the first time since last year’s ECMOD.--SC

The June Catalogue Log

Last month we introduced the Catalogue Log, in which we analysed the catalogues received by Catalogue e-business to date to see what sort of offers were made. We also promised to update it monthly. Well, here’s the Catalogue Log for June.

Of the 129 catalogues tallied in June, 44—34.1 percent—promised some sort of sale or discount. That’s down appreciably from 42.6 percent of the May catalogues. The percentage of free-delivery offers declined as well, from 11 percent in May to 8.5 percent in June. On the other hand, the percentage offering a free gift increased significantly, from 11 percent in May to 17.8 percent.

Overall 46.5 percent of the catalogues did not tout any promotions, discounts, or offers on their cover. Some, such as food and wine merchant Atkins and Potts and educational supplier Morleys Early Years, played up the new additions to their product range instead. Others, such as Party Pieces, Fire Protection Online, and DIY retailer Wickes, pointed out their order deadlines for next-day delivery (1pm, 2pm, and 6pm respectively). Several made sure to drive readers to their website (“There’s more online at wigglywigglers.co.uk”; “Watch the amazing spa film at lush.co.uk”; “Avoid the queues and check stock online” from knitwear mailer Woolovers). Most of the promotion-free cataloguers, however, didn’t include any special marketing message on their front covers, thereby failing to give readers another reason to turn the page.

A few items of note: Housewares mailer Betterware ran a competition for a year’s worth of free housecleaning. On the cover of its Tents 2009 edition, Taunton Leisure boasted of its “price check promise”. And both Easylife and Telegraph Select featured the same photo of a “versatile ladder” on their front covers—only Easylife charged £10 more.--SC