Something To Think About For Marketing

Just got home from a friends house, who sells his own stuff and my stuff on ebay . While at his house we discussed a file box he keeps of all our sales and name ,address and items purchased from us .
I asked if anybody ever talked to him about the name and address file ,answer was no .
This file contains all types of philatelic interest which people are ACTIVELY buying . Every active seller on ebay has a similar file . Now what kind of beat up dead list does the APS buy to do their active marketing list from ,surely our list and those other ebay sellers have are the prime list for any philatelic marketer.
I never heard of anyone wanting to get their hands on such a real list of people interested in stamps .

I'm confused and wonder what you are stating?

Stampmaster

I suppose that, to give APS or others access to ebay buyers's details, you'd have to have some sort of consent on the site, of the "Are you happy to be contacted by trusted grumpy old men in stamp clubs" type..

Three points.

First, I'd think twice about transferring someone else's personal information without their consent. I'm not sure that ebay's terms of service provide for the collection or use of buyer name and address information. ( ebay does have tools for email marketing to store "subscribers" but to my knowledge it does not facilitate collection or aggregation of customer ID information).

Second, APS collects prospects from a variety of sources, including show attendees, website visitors, etc. One important source is club membership rosters, which are used to identify members of APS chapters who are not also members of APS. There are other sources, of course.

Third, I'm aware of some instances of mailing lists being shared with APS. It does happen but I'm not aware of APS actively soliciting such lists. APS does offer business reply cards that ebay sellers can use to promote APS to buyers. There was also a pilot program a few years ago that paired sales of material on ebay with targeted marketing information about APS resources in that area, which had very low return rates.

If you are an APS member, they are happy to give you a pile of postpaid postcards that you can include when you send your sales. I do this and have recruited a handful of new APS members in the last year.
Dan (APS 86690)

"There are other sources, of course " ok that means they are using a LIST MERCHANT for supplying the APS. I was thinking a ebay activity list would be the highest rated source of new philatelist to harvest names from .

I am not aware of APS purchasing a mailing list from anyone (much less a "list merchant") in recent years (i.e., since I've been on the membership committee).

You should see my (messy) Rollodex file!

I try to save as much relevant info (collecting area, when I met them, or bought/sold; username on various online auction or trading forums (er, fora), etc. as possible.

One thing to remember, MANY collectors do NOT want their home addresses, phone numbers, even emails circulated outside their close collecting contacts.

For instance, I use my business as my ONLY mailing address; others use a PO box, for obvious reasons. We don't want to advertise to strangers (or even most acquaintances) where we might be living.

For what it's worth, I have my stamp room BOOBY-TRAPPED (is that still OK to say? Am I automatically considered a knee-jerk sexist?) so ANY burglars will IMMEDIATELY have a 2,000 pound iron safe come crashing down on their head if they proceed without disabling the secondary alarm. Also, my killer chihuahua WILL bite their ankles repeatedly and relentlessly until any thoughts of absconding with my stamps are negated by torn ligaments, veins, and remaining dangling ankle tissue....

But I digress.

The more we as collectors get to know, trust, and deal with, other like-minded (ie non-nefarious types), the better!


--Jim Wentzell
stampguyaps177-681

Jim:

You need this......

If you're an APS member, DO IT!

C.

I use the BRCs on all of my outgoing lots. I've been surprised that in the last 6 months or so I've only seen 2 or 3 with my incoming ebay purchases. They are easy to use.

The gun joke is very ill timed.

Using 1950 marketing methods like postcards has been proven to be effective in days gone by, I am sure there is still some value which can be gleaned from them. But years ago some of us began recommending that philatelic marketing be brought into the internet age. For example, we recommended that APS offer third party websites a small 'snippet' of banner code which website owners could embedded in their own website to link back to APS. When a user clicks on it they are taken to a APS membership signup page offering a membership deal; the referring website owner would get credit for signing up a new member. There were several other simple, inexpensive marketing technics also recommended including adding the three lines of code needed to embedded a YouTube video instead sending users off the APS website.

What SEO efforts have been made over the last 10 years? Many organizations bring web development in-house but outsource the more specialized SEO efforts that are also required. It appears that APS has outsourced web development and not done any significant SEO efforts. I do not understand value of spending money and resources on a website if you do not do the marketing to bring traffic to the site and then try to retain them.

For years we have advocated that APS try to develop and implement a 'go to' philatelic website. This means adding enough free content to attract hobbyists to the site. As Scott English recently posted, the current APS site is attracting about 22,000 visitors per month. Think about this… if every existing APS member visited just once a month they would be seeing over 28,000 visitors per month. This number should be north of 100,000 visitors per month if existing members were returning a few times per week and non-members were also attracted to the site. If the APS site was getting that kind of traffic then APS would have the foundation to eventually replace the AP hardcopy ad income with website ad income.

My concern is that the philatelic website developers and software 'techies' have formed a loose and informal group who pretty much now keep to themselves. Additionally online hobbyists and 'old school' hobbyists seem to have grown into two separate groups, each with their own ways of interfacing with the hobby. We should all be working together and APS can play an important role in this.

In my opinion IF the APS wants to capture the online collectors they are going to have to change what they have been doing (it could be that APS may want to evolve to become a specialized organization which mostly supports serious researchers, scholars, and exhibitors, they certainly have captured this group now).

I think that the APS has one significant and undisputed advantage over many other online resources, they can vet the content and material which is published. They need to add a huge amount of new, free, and frequently changing vetted content. APS should then focus SEO resources on the site to ensure that sure everyone understands the unique character and value that vetted content brings to the table
Don
APS #094826

The effectiveness of an approach depends upon whether you are preaching to the choir or trying to convert new members to it. Both groups react differently to the same promotional effort.

Those inside our hobby have personal positive feelings about collecting based on their experiences with it. Those outside the hobby react more to what they have herd over the years about it. Unfortunately, most of that is not positive.

Stamp collecting teaches kids and adults patience, organization, and persistence. These are three traits sorely missing from many educational programs today. These are mostly underutilized selling points when seeking new converts.

The hook best used to get the positive attention of new folks is to associate collecting with their interests in themselves, the area they live in, its history, and that of their family.

Another hook is their career field as reflected in current and past philatelic material. Richard Frajola on October 5 posted on his web site: "...about ten years ago my accountant asked me about price increases for the first class postal rates. I made up a couple pages of stamps mounted with the various rates of single weight domestic postage. He framed the two pages and also used them in a PowerPoint persentation to illustrate and teach about inflation."

Today is Sunday so I am free to preach to the choir. The rest of the week let us evangelize to the masses about the self contained rewards our hobby offers to all.

Please practice positive philately.

Best regards,
Russ Ryle

Um.... Why would this be such a bad thing?





With all due respect, I disagree with this line. Any self-respecting online resource has and will vet any piece of content that gets published. That's just publishing-101... Of course this excludes most of the user-generated-content services (forums, facebook, twitter) where the user should be smart enough to understand that everything they see & read is non-vetted.
But where APS has got huge advantage (in the US, not worldwide) is trust.

-k-