Small Touches - Bloom Audio

I purchased an open box Fosi i5 open back planar magnetic headphone from Bloom Audio (click here). Yeah, I have an addiction.

Let's just say this thing absolutely sings. My goodness!

Want to see what came inside the package ... beyond the headphone? We'll start here.

Two other notes of interest were in the package.

A thank you note.

A description of the individual who packaged my item.

You'll give me a thousand reasons why you can't do something this simple. You'll also complain that just 31% of last year's buyers will purchase again next year.

A while back I had a client who put a ghost in outgoing packages. They inserted a card, similar to the one above, describing the personality of the ghost in the outgoing package. You'd think the paper industry would love this stuff. It's hard to ever find them talking about it, considering it's ... you know ... paper.

Do something small, something clever. What stops you from doing something small like this?

State of the Union Address

No, not that one.

If you had to deliver a State of the Union Address for ecommerce, what would your topics be? What are the successes? What are the failures you'd cover up or blame on somebody else?

Seriously ... take 5 minutes ... pencil out what you'd focus on. Take a break, then come back to the document. The document says a lot about how you view your profession.

P.S.:  Read this. How does this apply to ecommerce? (hint - it should be in your State of the Union Address on ecommerce). You're not paying attention to the style of music here, you're unlikely to enjoy it. You're paying attention to how these folks generate attention and get paid. What are the parallels to your business?

Another Easy One

Take everything a customer purchased ... then create two variables.

1. Favorite Merchandise Category
2. Second-Favorite Merchandise Category

Now, when you are personalizing the merchandise assortment for email blast #6 for the week, offer products that align with the favorite category the customer buys from ... or second-favorite ... or categories that align with favorite / second-favorite.

You'll see a nice, crisp 10% - 30% increase in demand per email delivered.

Seems like something you'd probably want to do, right?

I Asked The Question Because ...

Here's the question I asked at the end of last week (click here).

I was recently sent a document where an agency mentioned that "you need to mail catalogs to reactivation candidates because catalogs are effective at boosting response".

The statement was correct.

One omission?

The catalog was not profitable. It was highly unprofitable, in fact.

• Demand = $1.30 per book.
• Ad Cost = $0.90 per book.
• Profit Factor = 40%.
• Profit = $1.30 * 0.40 - $0.90 = ($0.38).

The "brand" lost $0.38 among every reactivation candidate. Mail 100,000 reactivation candidates 12 times a year and you lose $456,000 of profit. Per year. Every year. That's what the agency wanted to accomplish.

Look, I get it. It is terrifying to spend your entire career working on a dying discipline. You could put digital folks on blast mode in 2002 because the catalog still mattered. You could put the search folks on blast mode in 2007 because the catalog was part of a "multi-channel" strategy. You could put the social folks on blast mode in 2012 because the catalog was part of an omnichannel future.

Then 2016-2019 happened, and you couldn't put anybody on blast mode because the catalog was dying. Slowly. One drip at a time. Mail/Holdout tests showed that 50% to 90% of demand attributed to catalogs via matchbacks was "organic", meaning it would happen without mailing a catalog. Nobody outside of smart practitioners within "brands" and a handful of industry experts believed the results. Why should people believe the results? The results were a threat to their existence.

From 2020-2021, people were in their homes ... buying from every direct-to-consumer brand under the sun. Your business was "fixed" ... no need to worry about the troubling trends of 2016-2019.

In 2022-2023, response crashed (the end of the COVID-bump). At the same time, paper either wasn't available or became too expensive. Printers fired my clients while at the same time becoming "full service digital agencies". A fun pivot. Co-op performance died, and when performance was acceptable, the co-ops delivered a 65-75 year old customer.

In the past two years mailing costs skyrocketed. Declining response paired with increased costs and high organic percentages yield a clear signal ... it's over.

We have no choice now ... we have to change.

Go ahead and mail the top 10% of your file, where a 70% organic percentage and declining response still result in a stead diet of mailings.

For 90% of your customer base and for prospecting purposes, it's over.

I "asked the question" on Friday because your trusted partners are in a difficult situation ... your business can thrive without catalogs ... their business model is predicated on keeping you mailing catalogs.

We need to move on, together. There's no sense in protecting a business model with declining response, increased costs, and high organic percentages.

What am I missing? Tell me (kevinh@minethatdata.com). Don't bring "72% of Gen-Z are digitally exhausted" as proof of what I'm missing. Bring profit. What am I missing in my argument?

You Make The Decision

You work for an agency that helps a catalog brand determine their circulation plan. The Circulation Director required you to execute a holdout test. You told the Circulation Director she would lose sales by doing this, she told you to execute the test regardless.

The Circulation Director asks you to analyze the results. It's been sixteen weeks since the in-home date of the catalog. Here are the results.

• Total Catalog = $4.00 per book, average, via matchback results. No prospecting.
• Profit Factor = 40%.
• Cost of the Catalog = $0.90.
• Profit per Catalog = $4.00 * 0.40 - $0.90 = $0.70 profit per book.
• Mailed Segment = $4.50.
• Holdout Segment = $2.25.
• Incremental Demand = $4.50 - $2.25 = $2.25.
• Organic Percentage = 50%.
• Total Incremental Catalog = $4.00*0.50 = $2.00.
• Profit Factor = 40%.
• Cost of the Catalog = $0.90.
• Profit per Catalog = $2.00 * 0.40 - $0.90 = ($0.10) per book ... the catalog lost money.

At your agency, you feel pressure from your partners in the paper / printing / postage world to sell the fact that catalogs matter. Look at Nordstrom! Look at Amazon! Your co-workers are skeptical of the results, your industry partners are skeptical as well.

Tell me what you communicate to your client. You can email me your answer if you like (kevinh@minethatdata.com).

You can email me as well and I'll tell you what I'd communicate to everybody.

DID THEY SELL ANYTHING??

You want to talk about Thought Leaders and Lemonheads. Here you go.

41,000,000 views? Is that good?

Who the heck knows?

"We went behind the scenes ..." 

"... strategic thinking"

DID THEY SELL ANYTHING?

The most viral things I've done over the past twenty years ... I've had a million views of stuff I wrote on the blog, I've had hundreds of thousands of views on Twitter and LinkedIn ... do you know how much my business improved because of virality?

$0.

The most boring stuff I've written leads to business.

The most popular stuff I've written is meaningless.

Thought Leaders count clicks and views. Lemonheads marvel at metrics.

Practitioners count profit.

Simple Email Rules

When I model email buyer behavior, there are simple email rules that repeatedly appear.

1. If a customer clicks through an email campaign, the customer has a heightened chance of buying again in the next thirty-ish days.
2. If a customer clicks through two email campaigns per year, the customer is generally more responsive than average for the next year.
3. If a customer purchases after clicking through an email campaign, the customer is strongly signaling to you that the customer 

If you were to personalize email campaigns, just following these three simple rules gives you a ton of flexibility.