The Catalog Lives!

A funny thing happened on the way to proclaiming the print catalog is dead……..IT’S STILL ALIVE!

If you have spent the early days of 2010 analyzing the results of your Fall and Holiday campaigns, you may have noticed something a little strange; emails, God love’em, were blasted out in record numbers in 2009. That was good news for me because I sold a lot of email appends.  As a result of all that clutter in peoples’ inboxes, not to be confused with mailboxes, the results were not all that impressive. In my humble opinion, direct marketers looking to cut costs as much as possible, yet still justify their existence, took the route of emails over direct mail to get the message to their customers, or in some cases to prospects. In many peoples’ analyses they noticed that the average transactional value in most cases significantly decreased. Marketers took the approach that more is better. Now many are discovering that more is not always effective. That’s the bad news for me – now they want answers as to why this approach did not always work. While marketers are trying to get a handle on this, we have seen the number of emails significantly decrease over the first two months of 2010, almost by the same amount they increased last year. Oh yeah…I forgot to mention that many are turning back to the direct side in the meantime.

Do not be confused; email campaigns are still highly critical to one’s overall marketing and branding efforts. What seems to have been lost is the fact that many of these email campaigns fail to “show me the money.” Just because they are cheap, it does not mean they are the best way to engage your customers. In order for an email campaign to be successful, the same tried and true direct marketing rules need to be applied. In fact, because emails are inexpensive there is no reason for the campaign NOT to be relevant, personal and recognizing the customers’ recent history with you. 

Here is a thought you may want to consider…if you have customers that have not purchased from you in the past six to nine months, conduct a test (isn’t that the beauty of direct marketing?). Take half of those customers and send them an email offer enticing them back to you. Then take the other half and send them a direct mail piece (catalog or similar) with the same message. I’ll bet you two things will happen: (1) your average transaction will be higher from the mailpiece as opposed to the email and (2) overall sales from the campaign will be higher. If you really want to get nuts, segment this group into thirds and the third group gets both the email and direct mail piece. 

However you want to do this, the important factor here is that you talk to these people as individuals. I was just at the Black Eyed Peas concert the other night along with 14,000 others. We were all there to see the great performance so we had that in common (like the customers who buy from you), but as I looked around, I realized I had very little else in common with those around me. So to “target” a message to this general audience about an after-concert party at a night club offering three-for-one shots of some kind of vodka until 3:00 a.m. on a work night would not interest me (actually it does but for this article the official word is that it does not). But a message telling me of a valet service that would also allow me a quicker exit from the place after the concert would be of great interest. The point is that your customers are very different from one another. You have the data to prove that. You do, right? If not call me ASAP. Now use it like there’s no tomorrow (because one never knows).

Me? I want to be media agnostic – use the best channel or channels for the specific campaign. But all channels should work together so your company will not only survive but thrive. 

Remember – your catalog is still the most important merchandising tool you have. Treat it as such.

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