Effective Customer-contact Strategies

Below, I examine a few contact options and consider the pros and cons of each. Remember to test before you roll out any campaign.

• A postcard is easy to create and produce, and it generally will cost less to mail than your catalog. However, a postcard doesn’t have nearly the revenue-generating ability of a catalog. So a postcard must work hard to affect a consumer’s current or future buying behavior. Again, this can be known only with testing. We recommend testing postcards as Web and retail traffic-generating devices and as a way to announce a special event such as a sale or a new catalog arrival. Remember, you must get the necessary lift to pay for the postcard program.