ROBERTS: Our business is actually up, though.
SCHWARTZ: Y ou might be an anomaly. You also might have some incredibly strong leadership in your organization. I think there's some truth to what you're hearing. [But we had] traditional clients who were slated to do e-mail marketing in '04 [who said] 'We can't even put this up to our board at this time.' We're each feeling a different part of the beast and I'm not sure which part you're feeling. With all due respect, I go out and I see lots of people who test online. And I still hear many tales of 'We just can't get the numbers to work.' And then you run into someone who [says] it's really working well and it's well executed and has great creative behind it and a strong corporate budget. And they're making it work and they're generating leads and they're converting them. But there's not as much of that as I'd like to see. We're still at the beginning of this new frontier. And that's the good stuff. For all of us in this room you have to say, 'Thank God we're in this room,' because three, four, five years ago, everybody was telling us, 'You may not survive. You may not survive if you don't embrace a whole new ideology. Everything you've learned is out the window.
SANCHEZ: The bottom line is that in direct marketing and the list business, people do what works. So if you had clients who were flirting with e-mail and it wasn't working, they're not likely to go through the aggravation. A lot of e-mail dollars come from bigger companies, and bigger companies have more bureaucratic legal departments, so it takes longer. The list owners and managers have always had privacy policies, [but] the mailers never thought they had to deal with that and this is what has taken three or four months
GOLDSTEIN: Think about Microsoft. Every time they do marketing they have to do a suppression file to everyone who says 'Microsoft, I don't want to hear from you again' within 10 days. That's just an incredible feat to manage at big companies
SANCHEZ: But it's an opportunity and I think list people should be in there offering them merge/purge database solutions, because we know how to do that
DECKER: But the major mailers, they just can't move that quickly
CASTLE: Let's talk about changes in the last year. Where is your business coming from? Is it established clients shifting from their brokers or managers, is it new mailers or owners coming into the market, or an increased number of orders
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GOLDSTEIN: Well, I think it's a combination of things. I've had to grow my business, yes, by taking on new accounts, by being creative in terms of new services, opportunities. Has there been enough new business, new testing coming in to replace the business that's dropping of? I don't see it. So I think you have to build your business now by looking for new accounts, and unfortunately, hoping that accounts will move to your business. But I think the other thing is more names. Let's face it, that's the business we're in. I'm continually going to the publications to try and mine ways to find more names. New names, new information, new ways I can create opportunities to enhance what I have
DECKER: We've worked hard to educate new mailers that come to us. I think we do more 'Direct Mail 101' than ever before. We value each of the individuals, not that we ever looked aside and didn't value people, but now we really understand each person as a brand-new opportunity. And we have to continually look at the lists we represent and say what type of segmentation can we present as new information, as a new opportunity, see what's new and what's going on, looking across groups of lists and finding new groups of segments that are important.
BARLOW: What I've observed is there are a few new mailers. Very few. [But] over the course of the last 12 months, a lot of people are re-emerging, people who were on the sidelines. We've had some good experience with that. And there are a lot of collaborative environments, folks who were doing other things in the direct marketing arena who are now going into mail, looking at e-mail, particularly some online folks who are going into postal. A lot of strength on the brokerage side. The challenges that need to be met are working that business model, thinking on a cost basis, how you can give the additional selects they're looking for-sometimes selects that list owners don't even know they have or that somebody wants cross-pollinating and still maintaining that price point you're looking for. We all know, as veterans in this industry, where they like to get that from-and it's from our hide. A lot of companies think of us as being 20% participants and it's a lot less than that. Sometimes they think that's the scope of our insight: 'Hey, you're 20% of my planning.' You need to work your clients so they know that you're the expert and not just a supplier. We're consultants and experts, and in some cases navigators, and that's probably the biggest challenge brokers, direct marketing professionals and e-mail marketers face, certainly in the database industry. A lot of folks wanted to build their own databases internally and we know that the real expertise is around this table, not the internal 'gurus.' The same with CRM. A few years ago CRM was 'Hey, everybody's a genius.' That's a sort of rear-view mirror kind of thing. You want to see how it worked in hindsight, rather than spending millions with foresight.
CASTLE: Very good point. The growth of technology has created a need more than ever for brokers to show clients they do more than just pick out data cards.
Opportunities and Challenges (Cont'd) |
