Adding targeted product groupings that give your business customers more for less, or that present solutions to their needs, certainly will boost your catalog’s revenue base. Product bundles and kits easily fit that bill. An example of a bundle offer for a consumer catalog: A cookware catalog that sells kitchen knives could sell a paring knife and a filet knife but offer both together at a modest discount. A kit differs from a product bundle in that it ultimately marries products that will complement one another under one SKU and gets the customer to an end goal of some sort. Keeping with the
Steve Trollinger
quare inch analysis (SQUINCH) is an extraordinary tool for consumer and business catalogers alike. Sorted and executed the right way, a comprehensive SQUINCH can serve as a creative road map to your catalog campaigns, just as your contact strategy defines the plan from a marketing perspective. A comprehensive square inch analysis allows you to evaluate product sales and placement to determine whether the right product, price point or category is given the appropriate amount of space in the right location in your catalog. And by basing the analysis on customer behavior, as culled through transactional data, you can keep your “gut feeling” from being
By Steve Trollinger How to use square inch analysis Square inch analysis (SQUINCH) is an extraordinary tool for consumer and business catalogers alike. Sorted and executed the right way, a comprehensive SQUINCH can serve as a creative road map to your catalog campaigns, just as your contact strategy defines the plan from a marketing perspective. A comprehensive square inch analysis allows you to evaluate product sales and placement to determine whether the right product, price point or category is given the appropriate amount of space in the right location in your catalog. And by basing the analysis on customer behavior,
Four critical components can help you create business-to-business (b-to-b) circulation strategies that measure up. While each may not apply to all b-to-b catalogers, they are: a goal, a tracking plan, good metrics and benchmarks, and buy-in. A cataloger’s ultimate goal is to establish a driving force behind a successful contact strategy. Are you striving to grow the buyer file, generate more leads, increase profits or drive up revenues? Each will have a different path. Housefile growth typically means you’ll prospect more, focus more on inquiry conversions and be more aggressive with reactivation strategies. You also may try new acquisition methods such as space ads,
Analyze Your Current — Not Past — Customer Base You don’t use outdated response data to build your circulation plan. Rather, you use the most current response data available, right? So why do many catalogers depend on studies that are several years old to define their customers? A comprehensive analysis of your current customers’ job titles and SIC codes for the companies they represent can provide valuable insight. The more you know about your best customers, the more effective you’ll be at reaching others like them. For example, say you’ve been targeting 25 percent of your circulation to computer analysts; this is based
For business-to-business (b-to-b) catalogers, the basic prospecting process using lists consists of several steps. In this article, I’ll focus on three of them: - understanding what you can spend on a customer; - identifying the potential prospect universe; and - using your merge/purge reports. These general steps include the key elements of getting through list prospecting in a way that gives you the most information and greatest opportunity for success. Expense Per Customer Understanding lifetime value, or even 12-month payback, is the first step in the customer-acquisition process, no matter what method you use to get new clients. Determine what return on investment
By Steve Trollinger For business-to-business (b-to-b) catalogers, the basic prospecting process using lists consists of several steps. In this article, I'll focus on three of them: - understanding what you can spend on a customer; - identifying the potential prospect universe; and - using your merge/purge reports. These general steps include the key elements of getting through list prospecting in a way that gives you the most information and greatest opportunity for success. Expense Per Customer Understanding lifetime value, or even 12-month payback, is the first step in the customer-acquisition process, no matter what method you use to get new clients. Determine what
If you’ve paid attention to popular culture during the last 40 years, you’ve come to learn there are certain things in life that money, apparently, can’t buy: love, happiness and all of those priceless things mentioned in the MasterCard commercials. But in the world of direct marketing, we have another to add to the list—customer loyalty. The Customer Hierarchy If you segment the customers in a cataloger’s database to fit into a typical customer hierarchy, you’ll see various levels of buying activity and inactivity that move a person from being a prospect to a “trier” to a buyer and so on until loyalty is
