Omnichannel

Most fulfillment processes are largely manual in nature, as only the very largest companies can justify advanced automation. Looking at the total cost of back-end order fulfillment — including direct and indirect labor, occupancy, and shipping supplies — total labor generally makes up 60 percent to 65 percent. That excludes any shipping costs because they distort the comparisons. Benchmarking ShareGroups, a proprietary program in which participants share benchmarking data, reveals that labor rates were typically around $7 an hour five years ago. Today, they’ve reached $12 to $13 an hour for many direct marketing businesses, plus a 20 percent benefit rate. But overall productivity

As many companies today cut back on catalog circulation and other marketing activities hoping to simply survive this rough stretch in the economy, smart marketers should seize this opportunity to grow market share and strengthen their businesses. This is the message that came out of a recent whitepaper, How to Beat the Bear: Seven Secrets to Recession-Proof Marketing, from e-mail marketing firm Silverpop on recession-proof marketing tactics, from which several tips are provided here. 1. Determine your metrics. Figure out exactly where your upper management stands in measuring success in terms of return on investment (ROI) and what levels of return it expects. This

In her new guide, “The New Rules of Multichannel Marketing,” Debra Ellis, president and founder of Wilson & Ellis Consulting, a management, marketing and operational solutions consulting firm, says conducting business as usual won’t work anymore. Your competitors are thinking up new ways to entice your customers, as technological advancements have created new channels and opportunities. These new channels and technologies are creating a virtual marketplace when, where and how consumers want it, Ellis says. The companies that can best integrate their various channels into a seamless shopping experience will be those that realize growth and profitability. That said, use your available tools to

With recent increases in postage and paper costs, many B-to-B catalogers are pushing harder and deeper into the online marketing frontier. It’s amazing to see many of the new technological innovations in online marketing (e.g., video, webcasts, podcasts and Google search changes, among others), the improvement in performance metrics and measurement, and good, old direct marketing creativity that we all know and love! The question is: Where are you on the learning curve? Where are you on delivering online results?
Today, if you’re not receiving more than half of your B-to-B orders online, with few exceptions, you’re performing below average. Also, if you’re not

PATIENT: Doc, almost all our orders used to come through the call center. Now 75 percent come via our Web site. We’re ready to give up on our catalog and go Web-only. Is that a good idea? CATALOG DOCTOR: To keep your Web business healthy, I advise keeping your catalog. You’ll be surprised how much the catalog drives both sales and profits. It’s probably the primary driver of Web site orders. PATIENT: But how can I know for sure? I need to be able to justify an ongoing investment in the catalog. CATALOG DOCTOR: Let’s look at four different ways to learn how

As per my headline, for this issue of Catalog Success: The Corner View, I hand my pen — um, keyboard — over to Catalog Success E-Commerce Insights columnist Alan Rimm-Kaufman. Alan heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online agency providing large-scale paid search bid management and Web site testing services, and was formerly a marketing executive with the Crutchfield catalog of consumer electronics. I leave the stage to Alan, who starts with a potential scenario followed by nine predictions for the future of the catalog/multichannel business as it affects you. Scene: A bar at a conference hotel during a marketing trade show. Bill:

Merchandise is still king. That was only one of a handful of themes taken from a wide-ranging and spirited session at last week’s NEMOA Spring 2008 Conference in Cambridge, Mass. This particular session included Derrick Egbert, president of New Perspectives; Allen Abbott, EVP/COO of Paul Frederick MenStyle; Jonathan Fleischmann, president/ CEO of the Potpourri Group; and Dana Pappas, COO/CFO of Plow & Hearth. It focused on the pressures of managing a catalog business in today’s uncertain economic times. Below are some of the tips/observations taken from the panelists and audience members. * Merchandise: “It’s the starting point,” Fleischmann said. The need for collaboration

During a session at last week’s NEMOA Conference in Cambridge, Mass., Peter Grebus, who heads Williams-Sonoma’s customer information management group, explained a two-pronged approach the home furnishings multichannel marketer has used to increase the adoption of marketing sciences for intuition across the organization. Specifically, he noted that in the short run, Williams-Sonoma has focused on a “four walls” process. The multititle multichannel marketer, whose direct business comprises 42.2 percent of its sales, has emphasized the integration of browse and purchase data to enable contextual selling across channels. This includes the following: * dynamic content and recommendations; * data that’s currently constrained by the

Every year, family and friends gather to watch the Super Bowl — this year was an especially good game, at least if you’re a Giants fan. But for many viewers, the best part has nothing to do with what’s happening on the field. It’s all about those commercials. And each year we marketers love to watch the ads and figure out which one we think is the best.
This year I noticed something different. I was struck by how many of them I didn’t get. I mean, I just didn’t “get it.” Thirty or more seconds went by, and I had no clue

This article assumes that insights gained from Web testing lead to effective print catalog presentations. That is our “Big Assumption.” If you disagree, skip to the next article. No hard feelings; see you next month. Still reading? Good. There are two decent reasons to accept this Big Assumption. First, the Web is so prevalent that the demographics of Web shoppers are pretty much the same as the demographics of all direct shoppers, making the Big Assumption reasonable. Second, the Web offers catalogers their first chance to do real testing. While many catalogers think they’ve been testing for years, they really haven’t been