Direct Marketing Days in New York 2001, the May 21–24 conference at the Hilton when envelope manufacturers and list brokers convene to discuss changes in their industry over the past twelve months, showed once again that the basic business — junk mail delivered to your mailbox — has not died yet. And this despite the Deputy Postmaster General’s grim announcement at one meeting that the US Postal Service is in dire financial straits and will raise its rates yet again this summer.
Nevertheless, the buzzword of the conference was “integrated marketing”: the blending of traditional mailings with email, and physical sites with websites. Perhaps a third of all sessions during the conference dealt with finding the balance between online and offline. Chris Peterson, CEO of the appropriately named FusionDM, noted that response rates for b-to-b email solicitations have plummeted over the past four years — from highs that grazed 30% to under 1% now (lower than for old-fashioned mail) — while the cost of renting e-lists has gone up, making the cost of email solicitations comparable to mail. In other bad news for e-marketers, the rates at which users are giving websites permission to let vendors solicit them by email are down from 80% in 1998 to under 40% today.
Perhaps that is why Roger Blackwell, keynote speaker on Tuesday and author of Customers Rule!, remarked that “the marriage between ‘e’ and ‘commerce’ needs a little counseling.” A professor of marketing at Ohio State, Blackwell has long argued that direct marketing is based on giving the customer what he needs, in the most efficient way possible. He believes that those in the catalog business (rather than traditional or online retailers) are best able to bridge the gap between the customer’s expectations and the logistics of fulfillment because they know that how the customer orders is less important than how their needs are met. Who’s going to break it to Jeff Bezos?
And speaking of whom, this year saw another decline both in the number of speakers or attendees who could conceivably be connected to book publishing. Among the few publishing types present, Rich Kelley, SVP of Doubleday Select, was seen wandering the halls, as was Random Direct’s Lisa Phillips. Which made Wednesday’s keynote speaker — Mark Victor Hansen, co-creator of the Chicken Soup series — all the more anomalous. It says something about the schizophrenia of this business, ricocheting as it is between what was thought to be a dying form of communication (mail) and its possible salvation (e-commerce and email), that a man who is neither a direct marketer nor in an industry that is of any interest to most of the attendees should be chosen to address the hordes. But he did, and they loved it. Hansen displayed an alarming tendency to speak so quickly that it seemed as though he were racing through his slides under the mistaken impression that his audience had the same set in front of them and could follow along. But he is, after all, a well known motivational speaker who says he has made 2,500 presentations in 35 or more countries, and who puts the number of books he and his partner have sold in the US at 75 million. There are, he says, 74 more titles in the pipeline. He’s a man on the move, attempting to help us all “entrepreneurialize” ourselves, whatever it takes, and whatever the means. NB: Hansen will present a full-day seminar at BEA on “How to Create & Market a Mega-Bestseller.” Admission is $197.
