It is no secret that print publications are a highly effective tool for driving e-commerce and retail business. Your home mailbox is stuffed daily with catalogs, flyers, etc. that ask you to visit the merchant’s website or store. Clearly, business believes strongly in the power of print to grow sales. Pat Callahan supports this position with an interesting case study about Latienda.com.
Needless to say, print is expensive. Pat estimates at least $10,000 to design, print, and mail 10,000 copies of a 24 page catalog. Even worse, print catalogs are incredibly detrimental to the environment. They are the antithesis of the “going green” movement. Chuck Teller at Catalog Choice writes that each year catalog production consumes 15 million trees and generates the same amount of solid waste as 2 million households.
The resource consumption is bad enough, but it is especially appalling when you consider that much of the content of all those catalogs is largely irrelevant to the recipient. Even when we get catalogs from merchants that we like, we have no use for most of the pages.
So what is the solution? One strategy is to ask merchants not to send you catalogs in which you have no interest. That is a good idea, and it is what Catalog Choice lets you do. Many people have made this request. But how far can that go? It is certainly a good tool, but it is only a partial answer. Most people are not going to take the initiative to make that request. And even those that do make the request will still accept dozens of catalogs that have something of interest in them. We’re just not going to wean ourselves from print anytime soon.
We propose a compromise. How about instead of general catalogs, we switch to targeted brochures and flyers? Let’s ask merchants to send publications that contain only relevant product information. And instead of mailing printed publications, let’s ask them to send links to PDFs that can be downloaded in a few seconds. If the recipient wants, they can print the PDF at home or business. Now we are saving billions of dollars, millions of trees, and decreasing CO2 emissions. Plus we are giving the customer a more immediate and more personalized (and probably less guilt-ridden) shopping experience. And as long as they’re going to receive the PDF electronically, why not make the online version of that publication link back to your e-commerce site? Now the PDF works for you both online and offline. What do you think of this approach?
Tags: custom flyers, e-Commerce, green