Pushing The Envelope

Obviously, mailing to outdated addresses isn't the best way to reach your target market. Finding a savvy list broker and sticking with him or her is. "[Using] one good list broker is a very good policy," says Maxwell Sroge, owner of Maxwell Sroge Co. Inc., a mail order consulting firm in Evanston, Illinois. "The broker learns which lists work well for [your company], and that knowledge is very valuable." This doesn't mean keeping the first broker you try; it simply means once you find one you feel confident with, stay with that person.

That's what the Buffintons eventually did. After their initial bad experience, they obtained the name of a list broker with a reputation as "the guru of mailing lists." But, Sroge adds, "you can never sit back and say 'It's over; we've done it. The list is complete.' " Over the last 10 months, the Buffintons have tested 15 or 16 different lists, each bearing some 5,000 names.

Even large, well-known mail order companies aren't exempt from the need to continually test new lists. "L.L. Bean, Land's End and Spiegel rent lists," says Don Chilcutt, owner of Chilcutt Direct Marketing, a mailing list selection and management company in Oklahoma City. "They've got to constantly feed the pot because some of last year's buyers won't buy again."

If there's one thing the Buffintons couldn't have been more right about, it's the concept of continual change-both in testing mailing lists and in tinkering with their product mix to meet their customers' needs. The Buffintons believed from the outset that if customers wanted something, they'd better provide it.

For example, when customers said they would prefer to receive the Brown Wrapper catalog in an envelope, the Buffintons listened. The second catalog, a 32-page full-color booklet, was mailed in an envelope. And when customers said they would be interested in a series of relationship videos, Len found some and included them in the catalog.

A few months into the business, one thing surprised the Buffintons about their market: It was 65 percent male. With the Brown Wrapper catalog teeming with books like Get Married Now and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, they'd expected most of their customers would be women. So the Buffintons slightly altered their marketing plan by concentrating less on female markets and more on those that were nongender-specific. Len says this taught them a valuable lesson about flexibility. "In mail order," he says, "the successful companies are the ones that find a new angle or market they didn't think was there."

Chilcutt says offering your customers endless opportunities to buy from you is the best way to ensure continued patronage. He calls the practice a "continual massaging of your customer list"-and the Buffintons are already doing it right. Soon after they began mailing the second catalog, Len began putting together a "jazzy" response package that rewarded customers with a free book. "If you believe in your product," says Len, "making an offer isn't so daring."

This article was originally published in the February 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Pushing The Envelope.