Omnichannel

Melissa Payner is a risk-taker. The 43-year-old retail industry veteran has been president and CEO of Spiegel Catalog for only 10 months and already has turned the place on its head with new merchandising, catalog creative, advertising and promotions. It doesn’t matter that the economy remains in a slump and catalog industry sales are down: Payner is excited to be breathing new life into Spiegel Catalog by refocusing on its customers and strengthening its brand image. There’s no arguing that Spiegel needed a change when Payner took the reins. Looking back five or six years, one might describe the catalog’s branding as

It’s a problem that every marketing manager faces: How to make your housefile more effective. For catalogers, your housefile is the air you breathe. If its quality is not properly maintained, your profits could decline as a result. Some leading authorities offer tips to freshen up your list and keep it working at an optimal level. 1. Know How Often to Mail to Your List This may not seem to have much to do with the quality of your list, but it all starts here. If you’re not mailing often enough, even the best list in the world won’t bring maximum profit.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it. —Yogi Berra This is the extraordinary story of a family-owned corporation that bailed out of its half-century-old signature business and took off in a whole new and highly profitable direction. In 1942, an avid young amateur photographer named Norman W. Edmund tried to locate good camera lenses. But the war had thrown a wrench into the entire stream of consumer and industrial products. After an exhaustive search, he found a source for his lenses. It occurred to him that other camera buffs may be in the same boat, so the

Growth is one of the greatest long-term challenges for any catalog company. Whether yours is a small catalog or a behemoth, adding significant growth year after year is, to say the least, a difficult task. Why? In general, catalogers aren’t adding significant numbers of new catalog buyers to the universe of names available for prospecting. This universe currently is comprised of more than 50 percent of U.S. households, but many of these customers have purchased only from the largest books, such as J.C. Penney, L.L. Bean and Lands’ End. This means we’re all mailing to a fairly fixed audience that’s constantly being pummeled—especially

As a cataloger, you want to maximize the performance of the prospect lists you use to generate new buyers. You also know that the prospecting universe for your offer may be limited. It seems the better-performing lists have too few names available for rent. Therefore, you want to do whatever you can to cause marginal outside lists to perform at break-even or above. How can you improve the performance of outside-rented lists in your next campaign? And what about the added costs of doing so? Marginal List Optimization The process of optimizing outside-rented lists, commonly called marginal list optimization, can increase response rates. One

“The Soul of the New Consumer:Authenticity—What We Buy and Why in the New Economy,” by David Lewis and Darren Bridger, Nicholas Brealey Publishing (www.nbrealey-books.com). Available in both hard- and soft-cover editions. As a marketer, do you understand the soul of the New Consumer? In their book, David Lewis and Darren Bridger note: In a hypercompetitive world of fragmented markets and independently minded, well-informed individuals, companies that fail to understand and attend to the needs of New Consumers are doomed to extinction. Lewis and Bridger, researchers specializing in the study of international consumers, define New Consumers as follows: New, because their style

Periodically I get phone calls from fledgling entrepreneurs who have great products and want to get into direct mail. “What else have you got?” is always my first question. “Wha ... what do you mean?” “What other products?” “This is my only product.” I say, “In the words of consultant Susan McIntyre: ‘The key to long-term profitability is to build a large house list of repeat buyers.’ That’s true for any direct marketing business—catalog or otherwise.” “But don’t you want to hear about my product?” “What does it sell for?” “Uh, $20, maybe.” “Test it in space,” I tell the person. “Take a small

There are breakthroughs lurking in all of our businesses. They are in the mind of someone in your organization and are just dying to get out there to be tested. One of the things I love about being in the direct marketing industry is the relative ease and low cost of testing. As responsible catalogers, we should test something in every mailing. “Test, test, test” is my mantra for catalogers. By testing you might find ways to cut expenses, achieve incremental revenue or dramatically alter the course and performance of your business. But to find ‘em, you gotta test ‘em. In this

My old professor, Frank Knight, used to say, that what people wanted was not the satisfaction of their wants, but better wants. —Herbert Stein, Presidential advisor and economist, The Wall Street Journal When I was a small boy growing up on Long Island, the big annual December outing was an overnight trip to Manhattan to visit my grandmother for the movie and Christmas pageant at the Radio City Music Hall and the annual visit to F.A.O. Schwarz, the great toy emporium on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street to see the newest in 0-gauge Lionel electric trains. When I became a man, I put away

Lillian Vernon began selling personalized belts and handbags with a black and white ad 50 years ago. Now, the company offers more than 6,000 items through nine catalog titles and a growing Web business What do Katie Couric, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hillary Clinton all have in common? It’s not their political affiliations. Think porcelain Easter baskets and personalized bean bag chairs. Now you get the picture: These celebrities are among the 23 million people who have shopped the pages of Lillian Vernon’s catalogs. The namesake business Lillian Vernon launched in 1951 on the kitchen table of her small, Mount Vernon, NY, apartment has