2008-11-04
Co-Mailing: The Biggest Controllable Variable in Your Catalog’s Printing and Postage Costs, Part 1 of 2
Catalog printers are running full-page ads touting their co-mail capabilities. Why has co-mailing become such a hot topic in the dialog between catalogers and their printers? Simply put, co-mailing represents the potential for very significant savings in postage costs. The variation in savings between printers, based on the size of co-mail pools, in-line co-mail and off-line co-mail, means choosing the right co-mail partner can be the most significant factor in selecting your printer! The majority of a catalog’s publishing costs are contained in the three P’s: printing, paper and postage. The cost of creative, list rentals and merge/purge is small compared to these three
Customer-Centric Approach Focuses on the Data
With the holiday shopping season upon us, many multichannel retailers are scrambling to find a new marketing approach to salvage something positive out of this troublesome year. Enter customer-centric retailing, the enterprise-wide use of customer data to establish a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior as a foundation for maximizing the relevance of cross-functional retail strategies. In a webinar from the Direct Marketing Association last week, Customer Centric Retailing — Making the Shift to a New Paradigm, presenters Miguel Pereira, director of consulting and analytical services at the customer retail strategies firm Precima, and Nicolle Scavuzzo, director of client services at Precima, outlined how customer-centric
E-Mail Volume Increases, Testing Lags Behind
The number of marketing e-mails being sent to consumers continues to increase, finds a recent survey. U.S. retailers and wholesalers will send 158 billion marketing e-mails this year, a number likely to grow 63 percent to 258 billion in 2013, Forrester Research predicts. But the increase in volume hasn’t translated into an increased reliance on testing. According to Internet Retailer’s survey of 174 Web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers, conducted last month with e-mail marketing and survey firm Knowledge Marketing, 52.9 percent of respondents do not test their e-mail campaigns. Here’s a look at some more of the survey’s findings.
How King Arthur Flour Has Gone ‘Green,’ Part 2 of 2
This week in the final part of our two-part coverage of a recent webinar from the Target Marketing and Printing Impressions Publishing Groups (sister publications of Catalog Success), Go ‘Green’ From the Inside Out: How to Develop a Corporate Environmental Sustainability Program, we continue our look at how baking flour cataloger King Arthur Flour has made environmental responsibility a priority. In particular, we’ll provide tips from Allison Furbish, media relations manager at King Arthur Flour, on how to help your business develop an environmental sustainability program. (For part 1, click here.) To support its environmental sustainability initiative, King Arthur Flour has partnered with a
