The Economy and Your Business
August 27, 2015   Dave Lewis

How to Keep Mailing in a Tough Market Hoo Boy. It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the stock market. How does that translate to your business? Well, just like with your investments, it is more important than ever to diversify – and to make sure the investments you have are secure. When I look at Standard Mail volumes over the years I see something of a bad news/good news view: The bad news is a slow steady decline in most years from a peak of over 103 billion pieces in 2007 to a comparatively grim 80.3 billion in 2014. Volume took a stomach-churning 20% drop from 2007 to 2009, but has resumed its gentle descent in the years since. Certainly the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 was about more than a lousy stock market, but still, it’s hard not to be nervous looking at the year ahead. So where’s the good news in all of this? Well, 80.3 Billion is still a lot of pieces of mail!  Even with an accelerated decline whereas the pie may be shrinking, there is still a lot of pie. The important thing is to make sure you differentiate and diversify. If you have nothing in your bag of tricks but print and mail you are likely to be forced to compete in a commodity market – prices can certainly be driven lower in these markets. Now more than ever, it is important to strengthen your mail offering and offer new channels to your clients. Remember, in the end, your customers are not buying print and mail because it is cheap (it isn’t) – they are buying it because it works. They need the mail to generate sales, to raise money, to renew subscriptions. Mail remains a unique, irreplaceable channel. But not the only channel. Your clients are always being enticed by alternative channels – the Web, email, and social media. These have the appeal of low incremental costs and a feeling of newness relative to stodgy old direct mail. Still, marketers know that direct mail works, and they are not about to abandon it because there are cheaper channels. There is nothing wrong with other marketing channels – you can’t ignore email and web-based advertising – and no one is in a better position to help your clients with those channels than you. Most direct marketers are going to have direct mail as an anchor to their marketing campaigns. If you can coordinate email to their direct mail, tie in web landing pages, and coordinate their web advertising, then you can make their marketing more effective and become more than a commodity. This is the heart of transforming your business from being a printer or a mailer to being a marketing services provider. You’ll still print and mail and that will probably still be your dominant source of revenue. However, as the mailing pie shrinks, you’ll be reinforcing your position as a value added service provider, and be adding a little bit of high margin revenue to offset that shrinking pie. At SnailWorks, our re-sellers are successful business people who are doing just that – adding new revenue streams by differentiating themselves from their competitors by adding new services. They’re not stopping what they’ve always done to make a living – they’re just doing it better and smarter – and often more of it because they offer their clients something better. We have no advice for the stock investments, but the best investment you can make is in your own company.

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