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Picture this: You’re on a sunny beach, stretched out on the sand. A child is sitting next to you with pail and shovel in hand. The child mischievously starts covering your ankles and feet in sand. You smile and continue sipping your refreshing piña colada. Now a dump truck pulls up and pours a mountain of sand all over you. You’re buried, and the sand muffles your scream. The former, pleasant scene represents the amount of data your marketing staff had to deal with about 10 years ago. The dump truck represents today’s daily data deluge.

Do you find the same words cropping up repeatedly in your catalog copy? Words like "great," "perfect," "designed," "style" and "provide?" If so, then one of the hazards you face is that your copy soon becomes predictable and can quickly lose consumer interest.

Fresh on the heels of a report from the Department of Commerce that December retail sales dropped 2.7 percent, more than double the 1.2 percent decline Wall Street analysts predicted, comes more bad news for multichannel retailers: 2009 doesn't figure to be any better. Such was the sentiment of a panel of retail experts during a session at this month's National Retail Federation Convention & Expo in New York.

With the Internet fast becoming the vehicle of choice for catalog shoppers to place orders, catalogers face the challenge of identifying what inspired those buys to begin with. The more marketing channels available, the more ways companies can reach existing clients and prospects. But unless a buyer purchases the old-fashioned way — via phone, fax or mail — or types the key code of a catalog into the Web order form, it’s tough to determine whether that sale was driven by the catalog, an e-newsletter, a Google search or an intentional visit to your site. Earlier this year, Catalog Success polled multichannel merchants to

The nation’s economic struggles will take its toll on retailers this coming holiday season, a recent survey showed. According to the Consumer Intentions & Actions survey from the market research firm BIGresearch, 39 percent of consumers intend to spend less this holiday season than they did last year, an 8 percent increase from last year. The recent survey polled more than 7,500 consumers. Here are some more findings of the survey. * 4.7 percent said they plan to spend more on gifts this year compared to last, down from 6.9 percent who said the same last year; * 31.4 percent said they plan to

A recent whitepaper from the search engine optimization and marketing firm MoreVisibility, 10 Critical Elements to a Successful Google Adwords Campaign, provides tips for multichannel merchants to help them realize the full potential, and profitability, of a properly managed Google Adwords account. Here are five pointers to take away from the report. 1. Keep your campaigns and ad groups tightly themed. Keep your campaigns and ad groups as relevant to your business as possible. Without tightly themed ad groups, you run the risk of Google not being able to determine the context of your groups, the whitepaper cautions. This results in Google misinterpreting

As one cataloger I recently interviewed called it, “terminal sameness” is the phenomenon of all catalogs blending together to look the same, particularly when it comes to product offerings. At the recent ACCM conference, a panel of catalogers led a session to help their peers break out of the mold with their merchandise assortments and avoid the “me too” syndrome. The panelists, Emily Harris, product manager of the spa and massage division of the Scrip Cos., parent firm of the Lotus Touch catalog; Jane Schmotzer, director of product development for the Christian Tools of Affirmation catalog; and Geoff van Sonsbeeck, co-founder and owner

During a session at the Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants held May 19-22 in Kissimmee, Fla., David Solomon, co-CEO of Goldsmith Agio, pointed to several reasons — both general and directly related to the catalog/multichannel business — why mergers and acquisitions have continued to increase over the past few years. 1. Value creation for strategic buyers. He cited multititle cataloger Redcats USA’s $198.9 million acquisition of United Retail Group last year. The deal not only catapulted Redcats into retail with 500 Avenue stores, but it also gave Redcats’ Woman Within plus-size woman’s apparel catalog and some of its other women’s catalogs

The other day, an experienced catalog mailer told me that her company increases its pay-per-click (PPC) ad spend on the day it receives its competitor’s catalog in the mail. “Interesting,” I said. It’s her theory that her competitor’s mailings increase the overall demand — and therefore the Google searches — for common products sold by the competitor and her. She also firmly believes that when her competitor mails a catalog and stimulates demand for, say, ergonomic office accessories, there will be an immediate increase in the number of prospects who go online to search for ergonomic office accessories.
By increasing her

In ancient times — say 10 years ago — catalogers prided themselves on having a precisely measurable medium. They were the scientists of the marketing world. Most catalogers took the majority of their orders by phone and spent a great deal of effort capturing source codes and order IDs from every call. As computer technology and database expertise became cheaper and more widely available, we were not only able to measure precisely which customers responded to our mailings, but also what they bought and from which editions of our catalogs. We measured the performance of every square inch of every edition and smugly thought