E-mail

Editor’s Note: This is the first article of a three-part series on becoming more proficient and adapting to the multichannel world. Parts two and three will appear in our June and September issues. Can you imagine a catalog/multichannel company not striving to become more efficient and effective in each selling channel in which it operates? Certainly not. This article focuses on the key issues and trends impacting multichannel selling today. It examines how you can improve your bottom line in each channel, cuts to the chase and identifies seven issues that smart direct sellers need to focus on this year. (You can also

Struggling to convert the sleek, fashionable look of its catalog into its e-mails, Chiasso decided a creative redesign was needed. “We have this great catalog that we put together and mail out, but in the e-mails, images were being cut out,” says E-Commerce Manager Brian Mehler. “There were six images that were cut out and put onto a colorful background with a message, but it was hard for customers to actualize that. They’d see an item in the e-mail with a green background and couldn’t imagine that vase sitting on a shelf in their home.” Along with synchronizing its e-mail campaigns with the

Having a hard time finalizing your 2008 contact strategy? You’re not alone. The mission hasn’t changed: You want to develop the most efficient way to convert prospects into first-time buyers and first-time buyers into repeat customers. But piece together the rapid pace of technological change, the volatile economy, the ongoing migration and evolution from phone to Web ordering, then add the likely distraction of the presidential election throughout the year, and it can make any marketer feel like throwing in the towel in bewilderment. Realistically, there are only three ways to proactively convert known prospects to buyers and one-time buyers to repeat buyers:

Many catalogers are missing important data that would allow them to make better use of both direct mail and e-mail to market effectively. Specifically, they don’t have the following: 1. E-mail addresses from many of their customers; consequently, they can’t use multichannel marketing to reach their best targets. They can certainly mail their catalogs, but they’re missing the one-two punch of using direct mail with e-mail. 2. Their e-mail lists often don’t contain name and address information. Therefore they don’t know the portions of their lists that are current or past customers. As a result, they can’t launch special campaigns to their best

Looking to solidify its online channel to complement its 23-year-old catalog and new storefront, modern home furnishings marketer Chiasso targeted e-mail as the answer. “We’re [primarily] a catalog company, so we need to provide a great book to look through,” says Chiasso E-Commerce Manager Brian Mehler. “But you can’t just send a catalog and hope it does everything. You have to provide customers with different portals. So our e-mail and Web site are our portals.” The Chicago-based company wasn’t seeing the results it had hoped for, however. Open rates stood at 15 percent and the clickthrough rate was 5 percent. Conversion rates were

Put Down that Phone

By now, a good number of consumers are well familiar with e-mail as a sales and marketing vehicle. Many overlook e-mail’s function as a customer-service channel, however, and that’s a good thing for multichannel marketers. Shockingly low customer-satisfaction ratings plague e-mail customer service. The same complaints are often repeated: delayed or no reply, and poorly composed replies with inadequate or incorrect information. To ease the burden of call-center customer-service reps by making e-mail a viable and effective customer-service outlet, eGain, a provider of customer-service and contact-center software, recently published a whitepaper, Mission-Critical Email Customer Service: 10 Best Practices for Success, to help companies

There’s that old Bob Dylan song about times a-changin’ that I won’t bother to quote further. But it seems to hold true moreso year after year, and 2008 is no exception. So while some of us continue to exchange “happy new year” greetings with one another, I’ll send along one last new year’s greeting with what I believe to be the top five actions you should act on, examine or just ponder to bring your catalog/multichannel business in sync with the times. 1. Get your matchback system working smoothly at once. Assign someone in either your marketing or operations departments to do nothing

Over the past few months, we at Catalog Success have been hard at work to further develop a hefty well of research data for our readers. In October we launched the Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, a quarterly series of original benchmarking research we’ve been conducting with the multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. In the coming months, we’ll also be running a series of mail volume charts provided by several catalog co-op databases. Like the Latest Trends surveys, these will run in the IndustryEye section of our print magazine. And for the past year or so, we’ve been running a regular reader poll.

According to various published reports, the average American company today loses 20 percent to 40 percent of its customers every year, and it comes at quite a cost. Research shows that when a company retains just 5 percent more of its best customers, profits can increase 25 percent to 85 percent depending on the industry. Accepting the fact that “churn” is part of business today, multichannel marketers should have a process in place to try to recover some of these lost customers. Churn is when marketers lose names or customers and replace them with other acquired names A recent whitepaper from data solutions