Mercury Mail opened in 1953, when Americans not only loved to shop from catalogs, but eagerly awaited the latest mailings offering everything from fashion, to appliances and specialty goods. Direct mail was the heart of many merchants’ business, and Mercury handled it well.
Today catalogs, brochures and coupons still pack our mailboxes, but the materials have changed; nobody mails the same phone book-size catalog to households from Long Beach to Topeka and Fall River, and the Internet has reshaped the marketplace.
Mercury, in Pawtucket, has had to reinvent itself to stay competitive. It’s done so with a combination of high-end printing and personalized URLs on mailers, post-promotion analytics, and now collaborations to expand its knowledge of social media.
Nick DeCesare, senior vice president of sales and marketing, recently spoke with Providence Business News about how technology continues to transform the business.
PBN: Mercury has been diversifying and expanding its services for several years now. How has that affected your revenue as the traditional direct mail business has declined?
DECESARE: We’re kind of four industries under one roof: a print house, a mail house, a data service and laser-variable, wall-to-wall communications marketing. … So [mail] volumes are declining, but in our case, revenues are up. The big reason for us is that we’re really changing what we send out for each customer.
PBN: How do you use technology to customize? PBN: Where did you get the data? Was it all from your customers? PBN: How big a part of that are personal URLs? PBN: A lot of direct mail doesn’t seem targeted and gets thrown out as junk mail. PBN: These services you are providing are more expensive than traditional direct mail. Are customers seeing a return on investment? PBN: Do you expect, five years from now, to be doing far less than 60 million pieces a year?
DECESARE: We’ve been doing variable data printing for some time. Originally we would offset-print letterhead shells or postcards and then laser-print personal information. … About five years ago, we invested in a full-color digital printer, and that really opened the door to a whole new world of variable printing – it wasn’t just text, but images as well. That took personalization to a whole new level … but obviously we needed the data to know what each customer wanted.
DECESARE: It was all from the customers; just recently we have begun offering services where we’d do something with that data – help collect it, add to it … our next step is to help with mining data, analyzing it, and building a strategy and concepts for future programs.
DECESARE: It’s a huge part. That’s one of our keystones for collecting data for our customers. … We’ve been using them for about three years. We’ve done well over 200 campaigns. They consistently show a response rate in the 7 to 10 percent range, where traditionally direct mail gets about a 1 percent response rate.
PBN: How does it work?
DECESARE: Each recipient is getting their own URL with their first and last name, plus a generic URL. For example, one of our first campaigns was with the Pawtucket Red Sox. … That was a single landing page that went on to a purchase site for the PawSox. They came to us and said, “We want to increase our ticket sales. We have a list of customers who’ve bought two to four tickets in the prior year, and we want them to buy 10. Can you help us do it?”… We reviewed the data daily, and after about three weeks, we noticed some trends. Every Wednesday we saw a spike, so we went back to the PawSox and said: “You’re top of mind on Wednesdays; did you know this, so you can market accordingly?” They had no idea.
DECESARE: You can become extremely granular. It depends on where you start and what you ask along the way. That’s what we work on with our customers. What we want to do is ask the right questions and based on the answers, create a targeted response back. It’s really creating a conversation rather than a one-way communication. … We’re talking to our customers about mailing when their customers are shopping for something, and not all the time. I think that’s also why social media is really exploding, and we’re making big advances in that world with our customers.
DECESARE: It used to be that every four or five years, you had to look at your business model; now it’s every 12 months or sooner, things are changing, and we’ve tried to stay as far ahead of the curve as possible, which is why we’re having conversations about social media with our customers.
DECESARE: It is a premium product, and there’s a lot more to it than what used to be sent out. There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to make sure the right mailing goes to the right customer at the right time. Where the biggest savings accrue to our customers are in that we’re only one portion of the marketing effort – there’s postage that’s ever-increasing, so if we can help our customers save on postage by giving them a much more targeted product, in the long run, they benefit.
DECESARE: I think that’s the trend for the whole industry. I don’t think direct mail is ever going to completely disappear – there’s going to be a need for it in one aspect or another, and I’ve seen some numbers where it’s still the largest spend in marketing – but mobile is becoming a big segment … and everybody’s catching up now. … We’re looking at all types of ways to stay ahead of the curve. •
