Gidday,

There are more and more services now that you can chose from to opt out of postal junk mail. Just in the last month another service launched their beta website, www.catalogchoice.org.

Cost
The service is FREE.

How it Works
Catalog Choice is under a beta release with a site that operates very similarly to our own. You can stop individual catalogs per address and add all the members of your household to your account as we do at Stopthejunkmail.com

Available Catalogs
You can search for a catalog such as LL Bean, but you cannot selectively stop individual publications from LL Bean. With stopthejunkmail.com you have a the ability to stop LL Bean Home and keep LL Bean Kids for instance.

Account History
You can track your opt out choices on your Account as you can with stopthejunkmail.com.

Usage
You can add any number of catalogs to your account and record the customer information from the back of the catalog, as we do at stopthejunkmail.com but we also allow other codes to be added from the address label.

New Suggestions
You can suggest new catalogs if you cannot find the one you are looking for, as we do at stopthejunkmail.com.

Direct Mail
They do not handle direct mail or the DMA, only catalogs. There are no banks, newsletters, magazines, non-profits, charities, Insurance companies or political parties, computer resellers, churches, hospitals or cable companies. Stopthejunkmail.com handles all of these and many more.

How Long does it Take?
Catalog Choice has over 120,000 individuals signed up plus over 1 million opt outs recorded. They must be very busy, I am a bit worried though because it is unclear as to how they process opt out requests. I am not sure if it is a manual process or an electronic process but they do promise your catalogs will cease in about 10 weeks. I did find a blog entry from Oct 30th that said “Our team is working hard processing your opt-out requests”. At stopthejunkmail.com we immediately notify each catalog company electronically when a member opts out and we have a proven success rate of reducing direct mail within 3-4 months.

Merchant Accounts
In the same blog entry they also announced the launch of the Merchant Section of the website. This new feature is for a catalog company to confirm their merchant account, this means they can chose to receive a file containing a list of consumers wishing to opt-out of their catalogs. “… merchants did not fully understand the benefit of our service and they wanted to take a wait and see approach before signing up.” Catalog Choice admits. It seems that Catalog Choice maybe promising a service that may not actually be accepted by the direct mail industry at all.

Also another new service this past month is www.proquo.com

Cheerio,
Margot