The 50 Best Tips

— Stephen R. Lett and Sandy Wolstencroft, Lett Direct, “Cost-cutting Tips You Can Take to the Bank,” September, Catalog Success

✱ Be more picky in who you mail catalogs to.

Know the people you’re mailing to are interested in your products by taking advantage of the new analytical tools out there. Be able to analyze data to know your customers. “The catalog business has become quite an expensive part of our company with the cost of paper, printing and postage as they are today. So you need to get your catalogs to people who are interested in buying from you.”

— John Watts, Edwin Watts Golf, “Golf (and Multichannel Marketing) The Watts Way,” October, Catalog Success

B-TO-B MARKETING

✱ Find off-the-radar-screen-type prospects online.

Search the Internet for companies that match your customer profile. These tend to be fairly small companies, perhaps newer businesses, that aren’t hitting on normal B-to-B lists.

— George Hague, J. Schmid & Assoc., “Upgrade Your B-to-B Multichannel Marketing Strategy,” January, Catalog Success

✱ Matchbacks the B-to-B way.

Run tests to determine the incremental differences between your catalog marketing and outbound telesales vs. the combined effort of the two. You’ll likely find that the whole is greater than the two parts in terms of both sales and ROI.

— George Hague, J. Schmid & Assoc., B-to-B Cataloging column, “Four Ways to Coordinate Marketing and Outbound Sales,” August, Catalog Success

✱ Integrate page changes.

Modest page changes from edition to edition of catalogs can improve productivity compared to pages that don’t change. Change 6 percent to 10 percent of inside pages with each monthly catalog mailing to customers. Creative change costs generally increase total mailing costs by 2 percent to 8 percent, but usually deliver much larger gross margin increases. Effective changes include changing category sequences and creating two or three versions of each important product listing (at the same time) and alternating them from month to month.