Quarterly Catalog Success (Now All About ROI) Latest Trends Report on Mailing and Marketing Practices (October 2008)

In this, our fifth Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, we’ve come full circle. We’re celebrating the first anniversary of our groundbreaking quarterly surveys of your industry. Unlike the previous surveys, which focused on key multichannel issues, management and creative, this go-round returns to the focus of last October’s survey: mailing and marketing practices.

And that gives you the opportunity to compare results from last October’s survey to see how your strategies have changed over the past 12 months. Simply look for the percentages in parenthesis that follow each result.

As with our previous surveys, this is a joint venture with the La Crosse, Wis.-based multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing, which helped compile the e-blasts and charts.

This report contains a detailed statistical analysis of a questionnaire we e-mailed to the entire Catalog Success e-mail list in late August. The first question asked respondents whether they were catalogers. The second question asked if respondents were directly involved with making decisions regarding circulation and marketing planning. Those who responded “no” to either question were filtered out, reducing the number of completed surveys from 282 to 184 fully qualified catalogers — an even split of 92 B-to-C and 92 B-to-B respondents.

As with our previous four surveys, these pages include many of the results but not all of them. For the complete results, please click the links under "Related Content," above and to the right.

There are some noteworthy findings in these charts. When asked how their total page counts will change for this year overall compared to last year, 27.2 percent of catalogers (38.3 percent in 2007) said their page counts would increase; 22.3 percent said theirs would decrease (15.4 percent in ’07); 50.5 percent (46.3 percent in ’07) said they’d mail the same quantity.

And clearly, the catalog’s role continues to change. Look up and to the right and see the portion of you who said the main purpose of the catalog is for actual sales through the catalog dropped from 64 percent last year to 58 percent.
—Paul Miller