Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Matchbacks (and More)
December 8, 2022 at 10:18 am

Not all direct marketers are familiar with matchbacks and why they're important. I thought it might be helpful to explain the matchback process and why it's a critical tool for evaluating results and developing mail plans. Matchbacks are the process of having your order file “matched back” against your recent mail files in order to…

Merge it and Purge it!
November 9, 2022 at 12:29 pm

In a direct marketing business, a customer list (i.e., housefile) is your most valuable asset. Therefore, it's important to manage your housefile and to keep it segmented and always up-to-date. To keep your housefile current, you need to merge/purge it regularly. What does this mean? Merge/purge is a process that identifies and removes unwanted or…

Getting Started With List Segmentation
September 29, 2022 at 12:07 pm

I want to discuss the basics of list segmentation and why it's an important part of maximizing profitability. Segmenting your customers (i.e., house file) will help you know who to mail and, just as important, who not to mail. The days of mailing your entire house file every mailing is over. It's time to begin…

What Would Happen if …
December 21, 2021 at 10:17 am

What would happen if you mail down to the breakeven point and stopped there? In other words, eliminate all the R-F-M cells that fall below the incremental breakeven point. This sounds like a financially smart thing to do, but is it? The cold, hard facts are that if you elected this mailing strategy it would…

Post-COVID Mailing Strategy … Be Careful Not to Overmail
August 18, 2021 at 5:28 pm

The horrific pandemic caused people to stay home most of the year, which created a large spike in orders for many direct-to-consumer companies, both catalog and digital. The increase in demand was so significant that it caused issues for the supply chain. Many retailers scrambled to purchase inventory in order to meet the order demand…

Catalog KPIs … Keeping Your Eyes on the Ball
April 28, 2021 at 7:02 pm

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are important to any print catalog or digital marketing business. Knowing how often and which KPI to track can make a huge difference to your profit and loss (P&L) statement. You need to separate the “nice to know” from the “need to know” information. Tracking nonessential KPIs might make you feel…

Catalog Costs: How Low Can You Go?
March 29, 2021 at 5:19 pm

Direct mail is experiencing a long overdue resurgence for retailers, hastened by the pandemic. Increasingly crowded ads on social media and Google, full email inboxes, SMS dings all day long ... while the much-maligned mailbox remained emptier as credit card offers dwindled and in-store postcard coupons were recycled. It’s not surprising that many e-commerce brands…

Catalog and Digital Marketing … The Future is Here Now
January 20, 2021 at 1:55 pm

2020 is a year we will always remember, yet one we would like to forget. It was a year that changed our lives forever. Some have been affected more than others, but we all have a story to tell. People talk about “the new normal,” but what exactly does that mean to retailers and direct…

What Will Catalog Marketing Look Like in a Post-COVID-19 World?
October 26, 2020 at 11:16 am

The coronavirus has been a life-changing event. We've never experienced anything like this before. Baby Boomers were young when polio was nearly eradicated with the Salk vaccine in 1955. At that time, very little was known about polio, which paralyzed and often killed young children. Science has greatly advanced since then. Even so, until we…

5 Stories That Generated the Most Discussion in 2015
January 6, 2016 at 9:49 am

What follows is a list of the Total Retail content in 2015 that generated the most reader comments. You’ll see that our readers are highly engaged when it comes to content on shipping rates — who isn’t when it has such an impact on your bottom line — social media marketing, payment options and cooperative…