A Chat With September’s Profile, Scott Drayer, director of marketing, Paul Fredrick MenStyle

CS: Does the catalog still prove to be an efficient customer acquisition tool for Paul Fredrick?
SD: Most definitely. In the analysis that we’ve done on lifetime value of a customer, with our models, a catalog customer is far and away the most profitable for us to acquire. But there’s not enough of them out there. And it does cost more up front to bring that person in. At the end of year one or year three, do we have a more profitable customer? We do. But it’s really kind of limited availability, or pool availability, that we’ve struggled with.
If I could find more catalog customers, I would. But when they’re not available, or it’s more cost-effective for me to pull in three customers from print for every one I’m bringing in from the catalog, at the end of the day those three customers are going to acquire me as much on the back end as that one from the catalog. We’ve kind of based our logic in the math of it all and tried to spend according to those rules that we’ve developed.