Can Database Marketing Work for Catalogers? (1,457 words)

No-hassle return policy. Modern catalogers make it very easy to return merchandise—and the best ones pay the return postage. Customers may exchange, get a credit or a full refund, with no questions asked! Such service was unheard of a decade ago, but has become standard.

Still Leading the Pack

With all of these new developments, you would think that catalogers would be in the forefront of database marketing today. You would be wrong. While every cataloger retains the names of customers so that they can mail them catalogs, and rents out the names to other catalogers, few have a marketing database system. Recent studies by Forrester Research show that catalogers with sales of more than $100 million per year spend an average of $18,000 on database marketing. Those with sales of less than $100 million spend almost nothing in this field. Why not?