Prospecting: Paul Fredrick Uses DRTV to Recruit New Customers

Paul Fredrick, a cross-channel retailer of men's tailored clothing and accessories, is returning to its roots as an old-school direct marketer to acquire new customers — albeit in a slightly different medium.

A national direct response television (DRTV) campaign it launched this spring harkens back to a print offer from 10 years ago that turned into a successful prospecting tool. The offer in question is a white oxford dress shirt for $19.95.

Working with multichannel marketing consulting firm Marketsmith, Paul Fredrick transitioned that $19.95 offer from a catalog page to a television ad. The retailer targeted its ad to run on television stations and programs where men are the primary audience (e.g., news shows). Marketsmith helped to identify those opportunities, including the times the ad would run and where it would get the best bang for its buck.

"We thought it was a natural progression moving from print to other tried-and-true direct response vehicles like TV," says Scott Drayer, Paul Fredrick's director of marketing and business development. "For us, DRTV has a lot of scale and opportunity. Right now it represents a significant but small portion of our prospecting mix. But we hope that as we develop better creative and refine the offer it can become a larger opportunity for us."

Paul Fredrick tracks its DRTV customers in two ways. An 800 number enables the retailer to identify callers who saw the ad on a particular station and program. For customers driven to the web from the DRTV ad — the majority at this point — Paul Fredrick is using unique URLs to identify the TV station on which they saw the ad. DRTV customers are then matched back to Paul Fredrick's customer database to determine if they were a first-time buyer.

Paul Fredrick has seen favorable results from its prospecting efforts via DRTV, reports Drayer. In fact, the results so far are mimicking what the brand saw from its initial 2001 print campaign, including many new customers. The difference is that today's DRTV customers come at a cheaper price.