Unhappy Customers and Unexpected Opportunities (jschmid.com)

Disrupt. Delight. Drive. Three words that, together, form a mandate for our catalogs. From crowded mailboxes our books need to stand out and garner attention; pay off that attention with content that creates desire, and – ultimately – compel our customers to click, call or visit. It’s a tall order. And that first piece, Disrupt, is the 1st priority. If it doesn’t happen, the other two won’t. We could mail an 11” x 17” oversized book. That will get noticed. So would a ‘scratch and sniff’ cover? But most of us don’t have budget to add a bunch of bells and whistles just to make us louder than the other guys. I’m particularly mindful of this as I wade through the current flood of women’s clothing catalogs in my own mailbox, most of them conveying the long-suffering mashup: covers graced with women pouring each other glasses of Rosé, or bikes with flower-filled baskets. Make no mistake: this is not a judgement, but a shared burden.

Last week I wrote an article about why Contribution Per Order (CPO) should be the critical revenue metric that businesses use rather than Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). As a reminder, while ROAS is an efficient measuring metric, it cannot assign health to a channel, making it a relatively useless tool. In contrast to ROAS, Contribution Per Order (CPO) brings in the magnitude of the campaign segment targeted. This metric subtracts the marketing cost and cost of goods from each order to determine how profitable each of those segments is contributing to top-line demand and bottom-line profits. In one of my side comments in this blog, I mentioned the need to analyze Paid Search programs utilizing the same metrics and by further separating into branded terms vs. non-branded terms. In a recent year-end seasonal review with one of my clients, Paid Search was only reporting at a macro level (combining branded and non-branded search), which can be misleading. As shown below, Paid Search has a relatively positive CPO compared to traditional print prospecting (+$1.16 vs. -$2.15). Without understanding the full impact, this client was considering marketing decisions to expand Paid Search, reduce print prospecting, and potentially eliminate print programs—leading to potentially devastating results.

The new research, which was carried out by environmental experts WSP, and commissioned by Marketreach, has produced a full carbon Life Cycle Assessment of mail. This is the first time Marketreach has looked in-depth at every element, from forest source to end-of-life, via the processing, design, production and delivery stages. It has found that, by taking every opportunity to regenerate, reinvent, reduce, reuse and recycle, mail can contribute to a circular economy, and be part of an effective marketing mix. *New industry-first study by WSP and Marketreach assesses full carbon lifecycle of mail and its contribution to a circular economy *Interactive online tool from Marketreach empowers commercial mail users to determine the carbon impact of different formats across the supply chain *Bold and disruptive creative campaign, including direct mail and out-of-home (OOH) launches today and throughout the planning and delivery teams have been considerate of the environment.