Who Needs Print, You Say?

Also look at which products Web shoppers are buying. Are they buying items featured on your most recent catalog’s covers or opening spread? As many as 60 percent of Web orders may include products that were featured in the catalog.

3. Do a matchback.
I hope you do matchbacks. But remarkably, more than half of the multichannel marketers surveyed in the January 2008 Catalog Success Latest Trends Report said they still don’t. If you’re one of them, you should know that a matchback is where you take all the orders that arrived without a legal key code and match back the names on those orders to the names on the catalog mail tapes for the same period. For most catalogers, 50 percent to 80 percent of Web orders come from folks who’ve recently received printed catalogs.