10 Principles of Catalog Shopping for Retailers

In the simpler days of yore, companies could use plain RFM segmentation to get most of the available sales from their housefiles. Today, however, consider a C-RFM-P segmentation structure with the following specifications:

C: channel of origin — generally store, catalog and Internet, but also can be others, such as TV or magazine advertising;
R: recency by discreet time bands, such as calendar season, but not with proximity to current date;
F: frequency of your total orders — 1x, 2x, 3x-plus;
M: monetary transaction value average; and
b>P: product dominant interest or trade style, such as tabletop vs. décor or sailboat vs. powerboat.