Catalog Doctor: Rules to Live By
5. More pages gets more sales, but those new pages don't necessarily pay for themselves. Analyze your square-inch reports and shrink images that don't pay for their catalog space. If products have already been shrunk as much as possible, toss them out altogether. A good rule of thumb is that each page you add should deliver around 40 percent of your current sales per page. A word of caution, however: don't count outlier products in that average sales per page, or you'll be way overestimating potential sales from adding new pages (I've seen products that deliver 30 percent, 60 percent, even 80 percent of a catalog's sales). Once you've forecast potential sales, you can then decide if the cost makes those pages worth adding.
Susan J. McIntyre is Founder and Chief Strategist of McIntyre Direct, a catalog agency and consultancy in Portland, Oregon offering complete creative, strategic, circulation and production services since 1991. Susan's broad experience with cataloging in multi-channel environments, plus her common-sense, bottom-line approach, have won clients from Vermont Country Store to Nautilus to C.C. Filson. A three-time ECHO award winner, McIntyre has addressed marketers in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, has written and been quoted in publications worldwide, and is a regular columnist for Retail Online Integration magazine and ACMA. She can be reached at 503-286-1400 or susan@mcintyredirect.com.
