B-to-B Cataloging: The Multiprong Assault
Site penetration — mailing multiple pieces to qualified recipients at one business location — is a proven response-boosting technique. At a minimum, multiple contacts indicate you’ve identified a significant business and not a SOHO (small office/home office) with one part-time employee. At its best, the technique can capture the entire market within your target company so you become its sole supplier.
For some B-to-B catalogers, certain job titles, such as human resources director, can identify potential customers. But other catalogers can’t easily narrow their customer bases to a single contact. Their products appeal to employees across an organization with a variety of job titles.
If you market nursing uniforms, for example, every nurse in a given hospital is a potential customer. Here, managing multiple site contacts is essential.
Here’s how to best identify qualified contacts at each site in your database and get your catalogs past their gatekeepers.
Mining Qualified Contacts
Here are two ways to identify additional qualified contacts at each site in your database.
1. Ask. When customers recommend your company to colleagues, you have a good chance of capturing that new business. Ask your current customers for the names and titles of co-workers who may be interested in receiving your catalog. While your reps are on the phone, can they view all contacts at that site? If so, have them verify that the other contacts still work for that company.
2. Model. Various B-to-B list brokers can model your housefile to identify additional contacts at your sites. These models are straightforward to run, often cost only for the names that you select and can be an effective way to identify additional qualified buyers.
Beating the Gatekeeper
The following three techniques can help you get past the most important gatekeeper at your target sites — the mail-room attendant.
1. Data Hygiene. When you look at your mailing files, do you see contact names where company names should be? Do you see suite numbers where street addresses should be? If your data is dirty, the cost to standardize it will be well worth the expense. Standardized addresses have higher deliverability, which increases response and reduces wasted circulation. They also allow you to accurately count the number of contacts you have at each site. This is a vital step to managing your site penetration.
2. Site Caps. Finding more qualified contacts at a site tends to increase response, but you can reach a point of diminishing returns. Some mail-room attendants even throw away multiple copies of catalogs that arrive in bulk. To circumvent this wasted circulation, cap the number of pieces that arrive at a single site at one time.
Of course, that said, you may inadvertently suppress the wrong names. Key decision makers and influencers are notoriously difficult to identify. A solution is to successively mail the names that you cap. Your first catalog drop gets the names selected for the mailing; the second and third drops get the names that were suppressed from the original mailing. If you handle multiple mailings at one time in your merge, this is a relatively straightforward process.
3. Flight. To flight a catalog is to spread out a single mailing using multiple drops. Mailers often use this technique to soften the impact of a large catalog drop on an overburdened fulfillment or call center. If you already flight your catalog mailings, you may want to include site penetration as a factor for assigning names for each flight.
This technique usually increases postal costs, so you’ll need a compelling reason beyond site penetration to implement it. For example, you may set a cap of five names per site on any single flight. If you mail your flights once a week over a three-week period, you can mail up to 15 different contacts within a company over that time frame.
Managing multiple site contacts is an often overlooked element of your marketing tactics. By proactively addressing the matter, you can increase the size of your mail file and reduce wasted circulation, which ultimately increases your return on investment.
George Hague is senior marketing strategist at J. Schmid & Assoc. Inc. You can reach him at (913) 236-8988 or at GeorgeH@Jschmid.com.
- People:
- George Hague
- J. Schmid
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- SoHo
A columnist for Retail Online Integration, George founded HAGUEdirect, a marketing agency. Previously he was a member of the Shawnee Mission, Kan.-based consulting and creative agency J. Schmid & Assoc. He has more than 10 years of experience in circulation, advertising, consulting and financial strategy in the catalog/retail industry. George's expertise includes circulation strategy, mailing execution, response analysis and financial planning. Before joining J. Schmid, George worked as catalog marketing director at Dynamic Resource Group, where he was responsible for marketing and merchandising for the Annie's Attic Needlecraft catalog, the Clotilde Sewing Notions catalog, the House of White Birches Quilter's catalog and three book clubs. George also worked on corporate acquisitions.