Grow Sales and Your Bottom Line

As you can see, the key "problem" groups included first-time buyers, inactive buyers, low average order value (AOV) buyers, gift recipients and catalog requesters. Each of these customer segments got a special message and offer to motivate them to a desired action.

Measure results: With a control offer from the regular catalog (and no offer), determine if the special wrap, message and offer are beating the control and paying for the additional cost of the outsert or wrap. Proper customer data segmentation and insert coding are important if you want to see decent measurements.

Test a new pricing scheme. It's expensive to do split price testing in cataloging. Even a simple black plate change can cost thousands of dollars in printing. Why not test a pricing scheme in a specially designed insert? Perhaps you're using a single-price concept and want to introduce a multiple-price scheme (e.g., the more the customer buys of an item, the lower the unit price). Test it in an insert.

Measure results: In an ideal test, you'd include the special merchandise section with regular pricing in the control catalog, and test an insert with the special pricing. You want to measure gain in unit, page and overall section sales vs. the control.

Test a new special offer. Many b-to-b catalogers want to test variable offers to their control catalog. You can do this, too, with a cover change, cover dot whack or a special multi-page insert in the book's opening pages.

Clearly it's important that the new offer message stand out and be understood by customers. That's why using covers and opening pages are critically important to conveying this message.

Consider testing multiple offers against one another to discern which have the most strength. For example, you could try the following:

Control — No offer