Moving OUT

COMPUTERS ARE no longer the off-putting beasts they once were, and so marketing them has gone mainstream. DMers find they can stray from high-technology lists and try office supply and electronics files. Increasingly, consumer lists are enhanced with high-tech information.

“There’s definitely a lot of room to be creative in recommendations,” says Kim Kouri, account supervisor at American List Counsel Inc., whose high-tech clients include ZD Events and Creative Computers (publisher of the Mac Mall, PC Mall and Computability catalogs). “Now you can assume that 60% or 70% of the people in relatively affluent households are going to have a computer.”

Al DiGuido, executive vice president of Ziff-Davis’ Computer Shopper magazine and its companion Web site NetBuyer, says that the big hardware story is the segmenting of the audience into first-time buyers of sub-$1,000 PCs and higher-end users.

Obviously, high-tech marketers still use high-tech lists, even though they’re expensive and only getting more so. An average base price can be upward of $200 per 1,000 names. “Controlled-circulation files are increasing in price,” says Kouri. “Some of the lists can be as high as $250 or $300 per 1,000, with selects.”

Still, those files, with their detailed questionnaires, can get very specific. “High-tech databases always have a lot of selectability,” says Arti Verma, account supervisor for business development at Name-Finders Lists Inc., San Francisco. “That’s beneficial because you can home in on specific segments.”

Another problem with high-tech lists is that the market is saturated with them and they won’t yield all that many unique names. “A lot of the high-tech lists have been overused,” says Lisa Lix, director of marketing at computer cataloger Multiple Zones International in Renton, WA. “It’s happening as a result of this industry applying more direct techniques.”

A major hardware trend is that now everyone’s gunning for the business-to-business market. Dell, Compaq and Micron have all gone that route. These hardware marketers want to sell to the big companies, but aren’t neglecting the medium to smaller outfits. Telecommunications, banking, financial, insurance and utilities are especially hot industry sectors.

Multiple Zones has been transitioning to B-to-B for the past year. “We feel that’s where the majority of this marketplace is heading,” Lix says. “But we’re definitely not leaving our consumer business behind.” In addition to changing the merchandising, Multiple Zones faces typical B-to-B challenges such as dealing with SIC codes, company sizes, business addresses and titles. Like many B-to-B mailers, Multiple Zones-which does about $500 million in business and will mail nearly 50 million catalogs this year-is profiling its database and pulling prospects from Abacus Direct Corp.’s new business database.

With B-to-B, purchase influence is a particularly important segment. “High-tech lists for programmers don’t work as much as they used to,” says Richard Wallet, vice president of public relations at Tiger Direct Inc., Miami, a division of Global DirectMail Corp. “Now it seems their bosses or purchasing agents are the ones to target. We’ve had more success with casual business users-otherwise-known DM buyers and not necessarily of PCs.”

Tiger Direct, which in recent years switched its focus from software to hardware, sells its products primarily through catalogs, supplemented by ads in the trade press. It sends out a monthly catalog which has a total circulation of 2.6 million (600,000 is from its office products book).

Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, started CompaqDirectPlus in 1993, targeting small businesses. Compaq mails a catalog and solo pieces totaling “millions [of pieces] per quarter,” says Dave Middleton, vice president in charge of direct marketing. It also advertises in publications aimed at consumers who are shopping for computer products, such as PC Magazine, PC World and PC Week.

Says Middleton, “We try to create an opportunity with demand generation to intercept customers whether buying or just learning about the products. We channel them into the [call center’s] Compaq Welcome Center to get answers to questions or references to resellers, and if they want to buy direct we can channel them to [a sales representative].”

Last month Compaq announced a joint campaign to increase its sales through Insight Enterprises Inc., the Tempe, AZ computer direct marketer; Insight now has a dedicated phone hotline for Compaq products and a joint Web site with Compaq (http://compaq.insight.com).

High-tech experts say there’s also opportunity on the B-to-B software side. Hot software categories include accounting, invoicing, financial, EDI, e-commerce, year 2000, help desk and call center.

Howard J. Sewell, president of Connect Direct, a Redwood City, CA, agency that specializes in B-to-B software marketers, says the best mail approach is the classic letter package.

“We’ve tested a number of formats against letter packages in the corporate audience, postcards and self mailers,” he notes. “The letters generated 50% more in response. I think a large part of it is that a lot of that stuff just doesn’t make it out of the mailroom. I’ve heard that anecdotally.”

Sewell says the messages in his letters are not technical, but rather stress what the software can do for the prospect’s business. He often includes an offer for a white paper or an information kit as a lead-generation device.

For Informatica Corp., a Palo Alto, CA, developer of data-mart software, Sewell sent a letter with a photo of the “Jump Start Your Data Mart” kit to 15,000 firms and got a 4% response.

On the consumer side, financial and educational software are big. According to several experts, consumer software companies are enjoying mail success by modeling with The Polk Co.’s NDL Lifestyle Selector database.

Transparent Language Inc., Hollis, NH, which sells 400 language-learning and translation titles, mails about 6 million pieces a year. “What works for us is finding someone interested in language learning who has a computer,” says direct marketing manager Kathryn Joy. “So we use maybe a list of people who read a French magazine or a Spanish magazine, or people who order a foreign language audio cassette out of a catalog, or who have purchased software and hope they’re interested in learning a language. We have a product that’s wide enough to spread that net.”

One would think that software buyer lists would be a sure thing, but Joy says that consolidation in the industry (e.g., The Learning Company’s buying spree) has made that less so. They bring less of a response, she adds, because the larger companies often aren’t as close to their customers as the smaller outfits selling fewer products, which tend to have better lists.