Omnichannel

Your direct selling expense ratio is as important to track as your cost-of-goods ratio and other key metrics on your income statement. Indeed, controlling your direct selling expense ratio plays a major role in helping to improve your catalog company’s profitability. This month, I’ll focus on ways you can reduce your direct selling expense ratio. But first, let’s look at what normally comprises direct selling expenses: - catalog creative costs; - printing and paper; - ink-jet addressing and mailing expenses; - bind-in order forms and envelopes; - postage; - outside list expenses; and - merge/purge costs. Direct selling expenses

While you might think bow ties are a fashion statement best made by tuxedoed grooms, maître d’s and waiters, the founders of Beau Ties Ltd. of Vermont would disagree with you. So would Beau Ties’ customers, whose love of the butterfly-shaped neckwear has allowed this catalog to grow from a one-page flier mailed to 3,500 names in 1993 to a 56-page book with annual sales in excess of $2 million. In the 13 years Beau Ties has been in business, founders Bill Kenerson and Deb Venman have learned a thing or two about marketing to a niche audience. For this catalog, the right mix

As a multichannel marketer, you touch your customers in many ways. In a given year, they’ll see your catalog, e-mails, postcards, package inserts, Web site and even store displays. Across these varied media, what should stay the same? What should be different? Lois Boyle, president of Mission, Kan.-based catalog consultancy J. Schmid& Associates, offers the following three tips on maintaining brand identity across multiple customer touchpoints. 1. Vary your message, not your voice. Customers will get used to the way you speak to them, notes Boyle. If the same person isn’t responsible for writing copy for every customer touchpoint, keep samples of your copy voice on

Do you want to create a reporting system that quantifies your catalog company’s successful interaction between customers and employees? Start with the five R’s: Retention analysis. Review both employees and customers. Companies with long-term employees can offer better service to customers than those with high staff turnover rates. Losing employees due to low wages and/or high stress is counter-productive when you look at the costs associated with recruiting and training quality employees. If you have a challenge retaining quality people, reallocate funds to improve existing employees’ wages. Becoming an employer of choice will improve your retention rates significantly and will reduce costs. To retain

“List universes have shrunk, no doubt about it. And the economic climate is tougher than it has been in years for many catalogers, especially smaller niche titles like Design Toscano,” says Erik Martinez, the catalog’s vice president of marketing and information technology. So for Design Toscano, a home furnishings cataloger based near Chicago, looking for prospect lists with similar affinities is like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. Where have all the good prospect lists gone? “Some catalogs went under, while others responded to the economic climate by expanding into broader merchandise offerings,” Martinez notes. “That doesn’t help us, because

Big changes are afoot online. It’s still early, but I see two trends that will impact online marketing: 1) the sharing of content and 2) the sharing of applications. These two trends haven’t fully arrived, and so they don’t have well-established names yet. But their early glimmers are visible today in the growth of really simple syndication (RSS) and the growing popularity of Web service application programming interfaces (APIs). These trends — let’s call them “open content” and “open apps” — are coming fast. During the next few years they’ll revolutionize the Web, and in doing so, revolutionize online marketing. This article

Time and teamwork: Such variables remain crucial to achieving broad marketing goals, according to a new study done by AMR Research for Unica Corp., a provider of enteprise marketing management software. ¥ Sixty-one percent of the 120 marketers surveyed said they lack confidence that their marketing resources and dollars are being used efficiently. Most respondents cited lack of coordination between departments and time constraints that inhibit their ability to focus on marketing objectives. ¥ Only about 40 percent of marketers say their companies have the ability to deliver targeted marketing offers during customer service interactions. ¥ And only 34 percent say they deliver consistent

Looking for industry groups that are most likely to buy your products? Following are the results of an Abacus Alliance study of b-to-b purchases in 2004: ¥ Electronics, gadgets and tools are five times more likely to be bought by officials in heavy industries. ¥ Seminars and training classes are five times more likely to be booked by government agents. ¥ Books, newsletters and magazines are 18 times more likely to be purchased by those in the healthcare industry. ¥ Cards and stationary are more likely to bought by executives in finance/insurance and healthcare. ¥ And computers are more likely to be purchased by

Your Web site plays a crucial role in tying together all of your marketing channels. In fact, consumers cite company Web sites and third-party retail sites as being the most influential factor in seven out of 10 product categories as a source of further learning in their decision-making processes leading to purchase, according to a recent survey by DoubleClick. What are some ways you can leverage your Web site to increase conversions both online and off? Chris Shimojima, vice president of customer marketing at Sears Direct, shared some of his strategies on integrating the Web with your other channels in his session “Creating a Best-in-Class

Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them — not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort — the buyers of your product. —Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising, 1923 Savvy catalogers have long used testing to improve their mail businesses. And as the Web matures, catalogers are bringing the same discipline to their online marketing efforts. This article offers 10 tips for running direct marketing tests in the online world. The first seven are common to online and offline. The last three are unique