Cover Story : Tried & Tested

Day-Timers keeps tradition while breaking the mold to retain customers

May 2008 By Kate DeBevois

multipage

Creating Partnerships: the Collaboration Acid Test
How did Day-Timers effectively choose content partners for the online community? When setting up the community three years ago, the team spent time searching for "some of the most outstanding representatives," according to Maria Woytek, Day-Timers' manager of marketing communications. She says the company "strongly believes in partnering with experts who have similarities with the Day-Timer brand-such as related [online] content and basic philosophy." And she refers to initial partnership interviews as the collaboration "acid test," saying, "We were looking for people who were like our brand: established, with a good reputation and committed to quality and value while meeting the needs of their audience. At the same time, they are fresh, contemporary and embrace modern life for its challenges and opportunities."

According to Drudy, the collaboration process went well because the Day-Timers team spent time getting to know each prospective partner and understanding each person's point of view to ensure a good match. His advice for marketers in product collaboration or partnership interviewing processes: "Communicate well up front so there are no surprises."

Leveraging Partnerships for Multichannel Marketing
After Day-Timers chose experts to feature in its five community segments, its attention centered on leveraging these partnerships to boost ROI. From a marketing perspective, "the community is a way for us to share audiences with our experts, cross-promote each other with the media, assist with SEO and give consumers added reasons to return to the Web site," says Brian Huck, the company's circulation and database manager.

The community experts essentially serve as Day-Timers' spokespeople. They provide a resource for content that Day-Timers is leveraging across several channels, including: in product offerings, on the Web, in the customer e-newsletter, in the catalog and via media relations.

For example, the various experts are featured on the outer envelopes for new Day-Timers planner direct mail offers, and while the mailings are too fresh to analyze results, Drudy has seen an increase in sales since integrating the online community with direct mail efforts. These spokespeople also record editorial-driven podcasts for the community segments.

While the mail-order catalog is the workhorse for the company, the online community is Day-Timers' foray into driving more customers to the Web. One way the company does this is via inserts in order fulfillment packages that include specific landing pages for consumers to visit based on segmentation data. For example, for small-business owners or on-the-go professionals who might be interested in travel workstations or other travel-organizing products, the inserts encourage a Web site visit to check out a podcast about staying organized while traveling.

According to Huck, the company also is using package inserts "to drive consumers from offline to the Web, giving them a specific search term to plug into the Web site" and providing them with a landing page to drive specific product items, sales messages and even offers. This strategy "gets the consumer to interact more than they would and helps us to track the integration of catalog to online," he says.

Channel Transitions
For a company based in direct mail marketing, shifting to an increased online focus while retaining existing direct mail customers requires careful choreography.

Historically, the catalog has driven the most significant response, and currently, product subscription renewal drives the most significant demand. Both are executed primarily via catalog and envelope direct mail formats. Day-Timers surveys catalog and retail customers to improve products and customer service. It then uses this data to improve online advertising and search terms. According to Huck, "As much as possible, we try to leverage the knowledge we can gain from that presence to help direct our online channels."

Integrating the expert advice community with the catalog is boosting both online and catalog sales. The catalog now features quotes and tips from the Day-Timers community experts.

"The community infuses the brand with an updated energy and offers a detailed level of expertise for our consumers. It has also been one way we've used to expand our reach and support our role as experts in each of these areas," Woytek says.

Sharing channel insights to better coordinate contact with customers is a continually evolving process, Woytek explains, as she meets monthly with key players in the marketing and product distribution departments to analyze each promotion, determine new cross-promotion opportunities and "share insight from one channel to the next to really drive the best use of the promotional spend we have available."

As mentioned earlier, Day-Timers regularly conducts customer surveys via phone calls and live chats (a feature added to the Web site several years ago), and it recently has turned the online live-chat sessions into "an idea-generating venue to gather tips ..." Woytek says.

Huck adds that the company gathers data from the site, e-newsletters, purchases and mail-order response to "drill data down into direct mail acquisition efforts based on demographics to further enhance our paid campaigns online." The marketing team uses basic information gleaned from other sources to "further enhance our online paid campaigns, based on demographics, to cast the widest net possible on the Web without refining the data because it is not as granular or as detailed as we need to be with direct mail," he says.

Collaborative Product Marketing: It's All About the Timing
The partnership with community experts also has helped Day-Timers to create three new products: a 24/7 Work-Life Planner with time-management expert Trapper Woods; the Productivity Pro Planner with productivity expert Laura Stack; and the Wellness Planner and Weight Management Planner with Lyssie and Tammy Lakatos, health and nutrition experts known as the Nutrition Twins.

The company carefully times new product launches to correlate with its partners' marketing timelines to boost efficiency. For example, the 24/7 Work-Life Planner was launched last year to coincide with a news release about increased productivity; the Productivity Pro Planner is being launched on May 13 along with Laura Stack's book, "The Exhaustion Cure" (Broadway, 2008).

According to Drudy, this collaboration has "been able to take us beyond the traditional time-management company and expand the brand into a productivity, planning and organizing provider ..."

Planning Ahead
With plans to continually survey consumers to understand how they feel about the online community, the work and lifestyle management company's trend towards involving consumers in both changes and new additions to the product line and customer communication vehicles has deep and ever-growing roots, says Woytek. And the online community is Day-Timers' linchpin for tapping into consumers' ideas about product personalization while expanding the brand through strategic content and product development partnerships.

In order to address the challenge of increasing printing and postage costs, Day-Timers is adapting again, focusing more on e-marketing tactics while still retaining the customer-driven values on which its founders based the company. Keeping with its history of developing new product lines to meet customer needs, Day-Timers has brought on Martha Curren, vice president and general manager, who is slated to focus on further developing the brand in the U.S. and internationally. Her leadership tenures at Lenox Collections and Goebel of North America provide her with the experience in direct marketing and brand extension that Day-Timers seeks to continue growing.

After 60 years in business, "There are many things that have stayed the same, things that the business was really built on: providing a product that is based on the consumers' needs, old-fashioned customer service and value to the consumer," Woytek says. "Even though we are sticking to our core values, we are looking at new ways to reduce costs and be more efficient. We are looking to be where the consumers are, to hear their voice and expand our market in response."

• MORE ON
• DIRECT MAIL & POSTAL
• ONLINE MARKETING