Our Groundbreaking Benchmark Survey on Catalog/Multichannel Mailing and Marketing Practices

We're very excited to bring you a groundbreaking survey, The Catalog Success Latest Trends Report. A joint venture with multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing, this is the first of what will be an ongoing, quarterly series of surveys covering different aspects of the catalog/multichannel business. This first report focuses on mailing and marketing issues. Our other surveys will focus on management and e-mail, among others.

The survey contains a statistical analysis of a questionnaire we sent to the entire Catalog Success e-mail list in late August. The first two questions screened out any noncatalog decision makers. That left us with completed surveys from 175 catalogers — 97 consumer, 78 B-to-B. These are great numbers, but if you didn't respond or didn't receive our questionnaire, be sure to the next go-round.

In these pages, we’ve included most of the results, but not all of them. For the complete results, including separate B-to-C and B-to-B charts, please go to our Web site, CatalogSuccess.com.

Some results, however, can be easily summarized up front. When asked how their total page count will change for this year overall compared to last year, 38.3 percent of catalogers said their page counts would increase; 15.4 percent said theirs would decrease and 46.3 percent said they’d mail the same quantity.

We also asked, have you or will you change your catalog’s dimensions (trim size)? Despite the brutal postage increase in May, just 13.7 percent of respondents said they’d decrease their book’s trim size, 78.9 percent said they’d leave their catalog as is and 7.4 percent would increase trim sizes.

Among respondents, the top five most prevalent types of catalogers were gifts and collectibles (17.7 percent), home décor (16.6 percent), women’s apparel (15.4 percent), books/audio/video (14.3 percent) and office supplies/business furniture (10.3 percent).

Special thanks to Ovation Marketing’s Lee Mullally and Dave Larson for all their help with the report. — Paul Miller