Cataloger Q&A: Dale and Thomas Popcorn Focuses on Cross-channel Promotion and Matchbacks
Catalog Success: What’s your catalog circulation?
PG: We mailed about 1 million catalogs last year.
Catalog Success: How are you expanding the direct business this year?
PG: We’ll be mailing more to our housefile and prospecting to other lists. On the catalog side, we really have to look at how we deploy our catalogs and how we measure the catalog’s effectiveness. It’s a tough thing in the new age of direct response marketing. I’m a huge believer in the Internet and think having a Web presence is vital to the success of any company. But it muddies the waters as to how successful your marketing efforts are because you can’t track back. The customer doesn’t always give you that information. Those are the challenges everyone in the catalog industry is fighting with, but I think everyone realizes that you have to mail a catalog. That’s the most effective way to get the word out there. People still expect it, they still want it and they will respond to it. You just have to figure out how to track it, and we’re working pretty aggressively on that right now.