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Once again we are devoting the September issue of the Food-by-Mail Industry Update (FBMIU) to our annual pre-holiday checklist. We hope this year’s checklist gives you new ideas to help you get through the upcoming Holiday 2009 season with fewer bumps and bruises than we all suffered last year.
In the October issue we will discuss more ways to increase traffic to and sales from your website. In November and December, we will cover trends and results we are seeing from specialty-food mailers throughout the Fall/Holiday 2009 season.
We would love to hear from you if you have any experiences—from trends in site traffic and catalog delivery times, to online techniques that are helping you sell more food—you would like to share with our other readers.
If you have any questions about the following checklist, or you want to talk about new ways to grow your food-by-mail company, please drop me a line. In addition, if there are other topics of particular interest to you that you would like us to cover in a future edition of the FBMIU, please let us know.
Warmest regards,
Tony Cox
President
5th Food Group
About 5th Food Group & Catalog Solutions
5th Food Group helps specialty-food companies grow and make more money by developing, managing, implementing and analyzing their online and mail order marketing programs. We are the only internet/catalog marketing firm that works exclusively in the specialty-food industry. Helping smaller companies or large companies with small mail-order or internet divisions is what we do best.
Visit us online at www.5thFoodGroup.com for more information and to download a copy of our free booklet, The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Catalogers, and for information on our fully guaranteed introductory program called Jump Start.
Website and Online Marketing
Our website is updated with all of the new prices, shipping rates and graphics from the new catalog, so we have a “common voice” across all channels. We have a written schedule for seasonal home page changes and know what they will be in advance of the season. Our website is optimized for higher organic or natural search engine rankings—each page has a unique URL, page title and meta description that is “keyword rich.” We have a paid search program live on Google Adwords that includes our branded keywords as well as an extensive keyword list promoting our best selling products (non branded keywords). We have separated our branded keywords from our non branded keywords into two campaigns, each with unique budget and bidding strategy. We have a written schedule for seasonal ad copy changes, keyword changes, landing page changes on each Google ad group. We have a written game plan for our e-mail campaign including offers, subject lines, and transmission dates. We will only send e-mail to customers who have asked to receive them. We are using customer purchase history to segment our email list. We will use e-mail to preannounce catalog mailings and new products, make special offers to drive more sales and site traffic, and to announce ordering and shipping cutoff dates for Thanksgiving, Christmas and other major gifting events.
Catalog and Offline Marketing
All lists in all mailings have a unique key code, so we can accurately track list performance. We have segmented our house file to eliminate unprofitable names from the mailings.
We have run our names through NCOA and other list hygiene procedures, so we are not wasting money mailing catalogs to bad addresses. We are testing at least one additional mailing to “best buyers” to maximize their profit contribution. We will mail a catalog to new inquiries within three days from the date they requested our catalog. We will follow-up the first catalog mailing to new inquiries with a remail four weeks later. In late November, we will pull a list of all new buyers since our last list update and mail them a catalog directly from our location. If we do not print a spring catalog at a later date, we have printed enough catalogs for a couple of spring 2010 mailings to our best buyers and all new customers. We also have enough catalogs for new buyers and inquiries that we receive between now and the time we print our fall/holiday 2010 catalog.
Other Marketing, Promotion and Merchandising Ideas
We have a gift list program in place—we will mail it, upload it to our website, and make it available via email to registered customers. We are testing special offers to reactivate old or lapsed buyers. New programs are in place to convert more inquiries into buyers. We have developed an up-sell phone script to improve our average order size. We have developed special offers to stimulate a self-purchase when gift buyers call to place an order. We have developed a list of “gifts under $50, gifts under $75, and gifts under $100” to offer to callers who do not know what to order. We will ask all callers if they have a friend who would like to receive our catalog. We will ask all callers if they want to join our e-mail list to receive special offers and announcements. All outgoing packages will have a customer survey card, a “send a friend a catalog” card, and food prep instructions (when applicable). We will communicate to customers via the catalog, other mailings and e-mail our cutoff date for Christmas delivery. We have scheduled a reminder mailing in early December to announce and reinforce our Christmas delivery cutoff date. We will read our key code reports weekly, and make on-the-spot adjustments to our marketing plan, if necessary. We have alerted all relevant publications (Press Releases) about new products we are carrying. All publications will receive our new catalog, samples of new products, and other newsworthy information.
Planning, Forecasting and Operations
We have a written, documented plan to achieve my sales, profit and name-flow goals. We have a plan to beat the plan. Our marketing plan maximizes the number of online and offline buying opportunities from our most profitable house file segments. Our marketing plan is based on a thorough analysis of our historical online and offline response data. We did not make any arbitrary marketing decisions this year. Our marketing plan is designed to bring in enough new buyers this season to meet our growth needs next year. Moreover, we know how many new buyers we need this year to make our numbers next year. We have run a pro forma profit and loss and cash flow forecast on this marketing plan. We know what we will do if sales are 15%, 20%, or 25% above or below our projections. We have contingency plans for cash requirements, inventory, personnel, equipment and packing supplies based on our “15%, 20%, and 25% over-and-under plans.” We have used our mail plan and historical order curves to developed forecasts of the number of phone, Web, e-mail, fax, and mail orders we will receive each week. We have enough computer terminals and phone lines to handle the peak weeks as indicated in our weekly order forecast. Based on our weekly order forecasts, we know how many seasonal employees we will need; we know when to hire them. We have access to enough seasonal personnel to answer phones, respond to e-mail requests, and pick, pack and ship orders. We have a small “bonus” plan in-place, so most of my seasonal hires last through Christmas. Seasonal phone reps are trained in our customer service policies, know how to enter orders into our computer system, are familiar with our products, and they understand the importance of getting customer key codes on each order. We have run the numbers and know exactly how much we can spend to acquire a new customer and generate our desired ROI. We are rolling out all programs that meet our ROI criteria. Once again, we have confirmed in our minds that we are not crazy to be doing this one more year. In spite of all the work, we know the food-by-mail business is a nice way to make a living.
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