E-Commerce

The blunt truth is that multichannel retailing is hard. Running a catalog business is a demanding mix of direct marketing skill and retailing savvy. Add in significant Web and store sales, and the complexity rises to a higher level. Successful multichannel direct marketing is a three-step dance: serving customers across channels, tracking customers across those channels and marketing efficiently within them all. Following are some suggestions that can help. Serving Customers “Multichannel” is a retailer — not a customer — concept. Customers view your brand as a unified whole, regardless of where and how they deal with you. They expect a seamless

Today’s multichannel merchants continually are searching for viable channel-integration solutions — a seamless blend across the key points of customer interaction, including catalogs, Web sites, retail stores and kiosks. “Providing seamless integration communicates a consistent message to consumers and results in higher transaction values,” note the authors of the LakeWest Group’s Fifth Annual POS Benchmarking Survey 2004. But as most catalogers will tell you, achieving that seamless blend across all sales channels is more difficult than it appears to be. Following are a few tactics that can help you make the most of all of your channel-integration intiatives. 1. Take advantage

Paul Fredrick Sacher is one of the five premier catalog merchants of menswear — primarily dress shirts, neckties and cufflinks. If he had 100,000 customers like Franklin Watts, he would be in hog heaven. Frank Watts was a hard drinking, wildly irreverent and funny traveling book salesman who founded a children’s publishing company in 1945 that bears his name today. The son of a Baptist minister, Watts once said that from his earliest boyhood he was made to wear a shirt and tie every day to be presentable in case a parishioner came to the rectory. All of his life, the only time Watts

Sometimes a little back porch advice can go a long way, according to officials at a number of e-commerce sites that have added “ask-the-expert” forums to their marketing mix. Based on the premise that friendly answers to Web cruisers’ questions can lead only to new business, some catalogers created online advice forums that add a human voice to their Web images, while also growing revenues. As you’ve probably surmised, ask-the-expert forums — Q&A pages where customers go to post questions and get answers from a company expert — are simple to set up. A Web designer posts a picture of a company expert

I’ve been leading a double life. I’m an editor by day, and in the evenings and on weekends I become a home remodeler. For the past four years, my husband, Tom, and I have been renovating a 40-year-old condo in center city Philadelphia. Our decision to renovate was a no-brainer. We got the unit for a reasonable price (all right, it was cheap). And it’s in a good building and a neighborhood that I love. “Needs a little work,” the realtor said cryptically. “Define ‘little,’” Tom gave her a sideways glance. We went to see it. She wasn’t kidding. By

1. What is paid-search marketing? It consists of placing ads for your products/services on Internet search engines and content sites. These ads typically are small snippets of text linked to your merchandise pages. You pay when someone clicks through to your site from the ad. Cost-per-click (CPC) fees range from 5 cents to several dollars per click, with an industry average near 30 cents. Leading search-marketing channels include Google, Overture and Inktomi. Additional smaller channels and new large channels are expected to appear soon. 2. What sort of catalogers benefit the most from paid-search marketing? Catalogers with fair pricing, good Web sites and

Few catalogers would dispute that e-mail marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods for communicating with customers. And in this day and age, it’s also one of the most hotly contested. Indeed, the e-mail channel is fraught with legal, technical and marketing challenges. This article provides suggestions for keeping your e-mail program legal and ethical, and it offers tips on increasing the chances that your e-mails make it to your customers. The Can Spam Act and You In December, President Bush signed the legislation known as “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Market-ing Act of 2003” or Can Spam. The law,

Problem: Before Ward’s Natural Science could expand its catalog operations to the Internet, it needed to develop a central repository for the accompanying data for its more than 18,000 products. Solution: Ward’s installed Pindar Systems’ content management system. Data for all products are now stored in one central database. Results: Ward’s launched an e-commerce site that has resulted in increased overall sales; employees have saved significant time in their data-management processes; and Ward’s was able to reduce two full-time positions. When executives at Ward’s Natural Science decided to expand the catalog operations to the Internet, they knew they’d need one central product database

Like so many of his cataloging colleagues, Dennis Swanson, president and owner of multichannel merchant Lamps Plus, originally thought his company’s Web site would serve customers only as an information portal. With 44 retail stores, Swanson figured customers would browse for lighting products online, but then buy them in his stores. Yet buy online they did. Still, Swanson suspected that the number of online orders would increase if customers could more easily navigate through his site’s 4,000 SKUs. The clincher came when he put a group of in-store sales reps online to offer live customer help. Sales doubled after a month. He

Does e-mail marketing work? Yes! In fact, 39 percent of online shoppers said they bought something through a catalog after receiving e-mail, according to a study commissioned by DoubleClick. Indeed, e-mail marketing has become a critical tool in the marketer’s drive for product-specific sales and to move clearance merchandise. Other uses include: encouraging customers to visit retail stores and to shop from catalogs; rapidly collecting inexpensive market research; providing service updates; and supporting partner sales. Following are 20 tips that can help you effectively and profitably use the e-mail medium in your multichannel marketing plan. 1. Use e-mail to alert customers that a new