The old Banana Republic catalogs from the 1980s used to feature several vignettes about the adventures of co-founders Mel and Patricia Ziegler, where they talked about how they found this neat, safari-esque stuff on recent journeys. These were classics. Theyโre bound for some yet-to-be-founded catalog Hall of Fame. Personally, I looked forward to getting those catalogs and always spent at least an hour with each. Around that same time, PaperDirect also was mailing catalogs. They had vignettes in them, too, but they were from PaperDirect product users โ people who were employing the products you were looking at in the catalog. If your vignette
Omnichannel
Editorโs Note: This is the third of a three-part series on becoming more adept and adapting to the multichannel world. Parts one and two appeared in our February and June issues. Smart multichannel merchants let customers decide how to order. You can visit a J.Crew store and order a pair of jeans via its in-store Web kiosk while talking to a service rep on the phone. What generated the order? In this case, it was a mailed catalog. Which channel gets the credit? That gets a bit complicated. Our first installment of this multichannel mastery article series detailed the key issues you should focus
Audio: A Chat With Septemberโs Profile, Scott Drayer, director of marketing, Paul Fredrick MenStyle
Do your siteโs sign-up forms read like a bungled attempt at getting a date? You: Hi, would you like to get coffee? Visitor: Umm โฆ sure. OK. You: Great! LETโS GET MARRIED! I love kids! I want a big wedding, then a week in Hawaii. Two girls and a boy, (after I make partner). Now Wednesday is poker night; can we spend every other Christmas with my mom? I like to garden, cook and โฆ Visitor: Youโre scaring me. Please go away now. Of course, youโre not that clueless about relationships. But your site may be. The No. 1 mistake marketers make
Catalog marketers are a pragmatic group. They stick with tried-and-true methods. New techniques must demonstrate practicality before implementation. Customer reviews and blogs are Web 2.0 techniques, and theyโve demonstrated the ability to build community and stimulate sales. Web 2.0 is focused on interactivity, collaboration and social networking. Marketing becomes more dynamic as customers and prospects are empowered with tools that encourage engagement. Hereโs how to harness that crowd-sourced power to provide consumer-generated content that will be influential in the purchasing process. Customer Reviews Some catalogers experiment with letting customers post product reviews on their sites. Typically theyโll use a form with a
These days, most B-to-B catalogers have a good handle on just how many new customers theyโre acquiring through their online marketing efforts. With matchback and allocation systems in place, most can determine the results of all their integrated online efforts vs. their offline efforts. This is necessary to allocate sales to the proper marketing effort.
The challenges arise when deciding what to mail buyers who have chosen to do business with you online. A percentage of such buyers will gladly tell you what they want if you ask them, but not all will. You could just mail everyone everything. But thatโs likely to
In the first part of a three-part series on the analytic measurements necessary for catalogers to understand their multichannel businesses, this week I outline four tactics to help marketers manage their Web buyers and look at why managing these buyers is so critical to their success. Face it: The Internet age for catalogers is here to stay. The impact of Web buyers on catalogersโ operations continues to grow. Web-created demand and online order-taking continue to increase. The issue for catalogers is how to calculate the impact of Web buyers and drill down and understand how best to circulate to these customers. The Web has
Start with the premise that catalogs and the Internet are interdependent and not adversarial. Remember the brick-and-mortar days when retail channels thought they should receive credit for catalog sales within their trading area? The Web vs. catalog debate is just as silly. Catalog/multichannel companies today recognize the importance of having an e-commerce presence, and many successful dot-coms now have a catalog or are starting one. The best run companies maximize both selling channels. This month, letโs explore how to manage those channels together, including mailing strategies for catalog/Web customers, internal allocations to both channels, the importance of matchbacks and profit contribution by
Editorโs Note: This is the second of a three-part series on becoming more adept and adapting to the multichannel world. Part one appeared in our February issue, and part three will appear in our September issue. The world of direct marketing is changing quickly. Whole new analytical tools, benchmarks and ratios have become commonplace in measuring success. You must think cross-channel if youโre to be customer-centered. And above all else, if youโre a stand-alone cataloger or retail store operator, the corporate atmosphere is forcing you to rethink your internal culture. The opposite of a multichannel approach is a channel-centric one, where one channel dominates
I recently heard an interesting statistic. According to JupiterResearch, Americans now spend the same amount of time using the Internet as they do watching TV โ 14 hours per week on average.
Hearing this led me to pause for a moment and reflect on how old I must be, and how things have changed. It seems like just yesterday to many of us B-to-B direct marketers that we started hearing about โthe Web.โ It was the early โ90s. Today I realize that my wireless network of home computers (I have three) are on 24/7, ready for instant use at any time.
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