E-mail

Put Down that Phone

By now, a good number of consumers are well familiar with e-mail as a sales and marketing vehicle. Many overlook e-mail’s function as a customer-service channel, however, and that’s a good thing for multichannel marketers. Shockingly low customer-satisfaction ratings plague e-mail customer service. The same complaints are often repeated: delayed or no reply, and poorly composed replies with inadequate or incorrect information. To ease the burden of call-center customer-service reps by making e-mail a viable and effective customer-service outlet, eGain, a provider of customer-service and contact-center software, recently published a whitepaper, Mission-Critical Email Customer Service: 10 Best Practices for Success, to help companies

There’s that old Bob Dylan song about times a-changin’ that I won’t bother to quote further. But it seems to hold true moreso year after year, and 2008 is no exception. So while some of us continue to exchange “happy new year” greetings with one another, I’ll send along one last new year’s greeting with what I believe to be the top five actions you should act on, examine or just ponder to bring your catalog/multichannel business in sync with the times. 1. Get your matchback system working smoothly at once. Assign someone in either your marketing or operations departments to do nothing

Over the past few months, we at Catalog Success have been hard at work to further develop a hefty well of research data for our readers. In October we launched the Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, a quarterly series of original benchmarking research we’ve been conducting with the multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. In the coming months, we’ll also be running a series of mail volume charts provided by several catalog co-op databases. Like the Latest Trends surveys, these will run in the IndustryEye section of our print magazine. And for the past year or so, we’ve been running a regular reader poll.

According to various published reports, the average American company today loses 20 percent to 40 percent of its customers every year, and it comes at quite a cost. Research shows that when a company retains just 5 percent more of its best customers, profits can increase 25 percent to 85 percent depending on the industry. Accepting the fact that “churn” is part of business today, multichannel marketers should have a process in place to try to recover some of these lost customers. Churn is when marketers lose names or customers and replace them with other acquired names A recent whitepaper from data solutions

The 2nd Catalog Success Latest Trends Report on Key Issues (January 2008)

We bring you our exclusive new Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, the second quarterly joint venture with multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. This one focuses on the key issues in the catalog/multichannel business. As with our inaugural report last October, this survey contains a statistical analysis of a questionnaire we sent to the Catalog Success e-mail list in November. The responses came from 80 B-to-C and 45 B-to-B catalogers. You can click on the separate B-to-C and B-to-B charts below, as well as the cumulative chart. Some percentages don’t quite add up to 100, due to rounding.

In the IndustryEye section of this issue on pgs. 12-13, you’ll find our second quarterly Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, a benchmarking survey we conducted in late November in partnership with the multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. This one focuses on key catalog/multichannel issues, and we’ve included most of the charts there, so I encourage you to take a look. You’ll be able to find some charts only on our Web site due to magazine space limitations. We also didn’t have the space to include the numerous comments that you — our readers and survey respondents — wrote in response to two of the questions.

The 2nd Catalog Success Latest Trends Report on Key Issues (January 2008)

The 2nd Catalog Success Latest Trends Report on Key Issues (January 2008)