How a sharpened focus on the market let Terri Alpert carve out new niches for her two catalog businesses, Uno Alla Volta and Cooking Enthusiast

By Mark Del Franco

The key elements in the companies’ databases are what Alpert describes as “smart codes” — unique product codes for every marketing presentation of an item. The two catalogs may have any number of different product codes for a single SKU, so each way it’s presented can be evaluated separately. “These codes allow us to always know the offer [catalog, e-mail campaign, Web search] and the page where a customer saw the item,” she explains. “This way, even if they don’t give us a source code and they order on the Web, we know exactly what drove the sale, and it feeds all the way down to the square inch.”