Making the Best Use of Your Catalog Printing Budget

11. Optimize your 24-month and older buyers at the co-op databases to suppress the 5 percent to 10 percent of your older buyers who have simply stopped buying. Suppress those households that are no longer active mail order buyers and drop those savings to your bottom line.

12. Email your housefile alerting them that a catalog is on its way to their mailboxes. Time the email to arrive right around the catalog's in-home date.

13. Use email campaigns to broadcast Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other short-lived promotions. It's too expensive to use your catalog to highlight promotions that only last a couple of days. Be aware that offering a promotion that expires before the end of your catalog's natural order curve really hurts your catalog sales after the promotion expires.

14. Use the headers and footers on your catalog pages to drive people to your website. Make it known inside your catalog that your website offers live chat as well as a toll-free phone number.

15. Challenge your creative team to provide you with front and back catalog covers that really break through the mailbox clutter.

16. Test lighter-weight paper on inside signatures of your catalog to save postage costs. Ask your printer to test lighter paper weights and different paper grades to see if the potential cost savings not only work for your catalog's brand image but also if they affect the sales per catalog metric.

17. Use catalogs as bouncebacks in your product shipments. Response rates on bouncebacks are often one of the highest responding house segments in your mailing.

18. Give this list of "needlemovers" to your print salesperson right now and ask them to come up with some additional recommendations. Remember, you aren't just looking for ways to reduce costs, but ways to drive more sales and profits as well!