Connect the Dots

Therefore, in addition to just looking at sales by category and price point, you’ll learn even more by looking at the lifetime value of customers by these same factors. You’ll need two to three years of transactional information to do this analysis.

Once you get the reporting from your system, you’ll be able to identify the categories and price points, and even price points within categories, that produce your best lifetime-value customers. Armed with these data, you can select repeated items based not only on how they performed in one catalog issue, but also on what kind of customers they’re attracting. If you have to choose between keeping one of two marginal items, these additional data may help you decide.