Creative

Because catalog space costs you money, you need to know which products are paying a return on investment and those that aren’t. However, square inch (squinch) analysis can be used to determine the relative strength of your customers’ demand for each and every product. This invaluable information then is used to make decisions about the catalog, such as featuring high-demand products and eliminating those with little or no demand. More importantly, however, squinch analysis provides a guide for correcting marginal items and shows you how to make them winners. The result is often an increase in total sales per catalog –- not just products

The advent of e-mail as a marketing medium has provided catalogers and online marketers with the ability to reach their customers with personalized, highly relevant messages that drive them to purchase again and again. In fact, 39.6 percent of respondents to The Direct Marketing Association’s “2005 Postal and E-mail Marketing Report” used e-mail personalization to increase response rates last year; 93.2 percent of those marketers said the tactic was successful. But before you can start slapping your customers’ names and other personal details on all of your outbound e-mails, there are five things you’ll need, according to a recent white paper from catalog management

Looking for some quick ideas to bolster your Web site or online holiday shopping initiatives? Jay Shaffer, vice president of marketing at home furnishings merchant DirectlyHome.com, offered several of them in a session at the recent Mid Market eTail conference in San Francisco. • Cheap market research is just a coffeehouse away. “Every six weeks or so, I’ll go into a Starbucks and find a soccer mom who hasn’t had an adult conversation in a year and offer her a coffee gift card for 15 minutes of her time,” Shaffer said. He then shows her three pages on the DirectlyHome Web site: the home page,

Last week, I blogged about getting the most out of your printer. This week, I’ll talk about some things you should never do when producing your catalog and managing your expenses.

The way to ensure your return on investment in the catalog business is to pay close attention to your catalog expenses, namely, printing, mailing, postage, design, prepress (these days called “premedia”), lists and service bureau. Coupled with cost of goods and operating expenses, they are the fundamental numbers you need to work up in order to define your break-even point for a particular mailing.

Carefully handling that break-even point by tightly managing catalog expenses is

In a series of workshop sessions during the DMA06 Conference in San Francisco this week, creative and copywriting guru Herschell Gordon Lewis, president of Lewis Enterprises, delivered numerous tips about design and marketing in e-mail messages. Below are some of the most noteworthy pointers. * Look for a rationale that matches what you’re saying and to whom you’re saying it. Sometimes sticking in graphics when your recipients’ computers won’t accept those graphics is a problem, Gordon Lewis said. * Test this oddity: Move “click here” up in your text, he suggests. You’ll usually increase response. “That’s due to an ancient rule of salesmanship: When your prospect

Among the myriad e-mail creative tips Herschell Gordon Lewis, president of Lewis Enterprises, delivered during a session at the DMA06 Conference in San Francisco this week, he brought out several key copywriting pointers for marketers. Here are several of them. * Tell your message recipient what to do. “Don’t just say what a wonderful company and offer you have; tell them what to do,” Gordon Lewis pointed out. People respond to a command. * “Don’t get diarrhea of the fingertips,” he advised in regard to overly complex e-mail copy containing long, technical words. “We tend to show off our gigantic vocabularies.” * Specifics out-pull generalizations, he said,

When it comes to integrating creative between the three primary marketing channels – catalog, Web and retail – much has been said about presenting a consistent image across all channels. But doing so isn’t always so easy. As Carol Worthington-Levy, partner and director at San Rafael, Calif.-based consultancy LENSER, pointed during a session at the recent New England Mail Order Association conference in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., multichannel marketers should enroll their creative people in “taking a role in the actual selling process.” She offered the following points and tips to marketers looking for ways to achieve multichannel consistency: Leverage your branding across all media that sells

One of the most-asked questions I get is, “What product density is right for my catalog?” There are two main drivers to finding your appropriate product density (or the average number of products per page): your brand and your square inch sales report. Brand. In general — but not in every case — the more upscale the brand, the lower the product density; the more downscale the brand, the higher the product density. So if you’re starting a new catalog and have no idea what density to use, look at competitive catalogs (or noncompetitors who sell to your audience), and take your cue

Sonlight Curriculum catalog’s tagline says “lifestyle” to me: “literature-rich homeschooling — education beyond textbooks.” Lifestyle in the true sense of the word: not merely aspirational as many catalogs purport to be. Homeschooling is, indeed, a lifestyle, and the people behind the Sonlight Curriculum catalog “get it” because they live it. This is one of the subjects that earns Sonlight Curriculum a place on the honor roll. Sonlight Curriculum seems called to a higher mission. Homeschooling is hard work, and clearly isn’t for everyone. This catalog, in addition to being a vehicle to sell the educational resources, is much more. As a true magalog, it

Connect the dots. All good catalog marketers know their customers’ lifetime value. And those who are savvy have a handle on their customers’ spending patterns by channel. In today’s multichannel environment, the winners are those who synchronize their online and offline efforts. There are many studies showing that customers who interact with a cataloger in more than one channel spend dramatically more than a single-channel customer. J.C. Penney was one of the first to come to this realization. A study the multichannel retail giant conducted with Abacus on annual spending showed: • Internet-only shoppers spent —$151. • Catalog-only shoppers spent —$201. • Retail-only shoppers spent