Special Report Lists

Asking online shoppers for a promotion code can help show from where your Web sales are coming, and good catalogers do ask, but it's still not a guarantee of closing the loop. Moreover, metrics show that with the Web, you lose some of the benefits of cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Concerning the issue of multichannel buyers, Grant suggests, "There are no more pure catalog buyers out there. Practically all catalogs have some Internet buyers. But when you analyze those buyers, the productivity of Web buyers generally is lower than from your print catalog. The key is rolling up your sleeves and looking at the data from all sides. Carefully coding and measuring productivity with additional variables will help you track multichannel buyers."