Database Marketing

Many database marketing programs lack focus, proper execution, segmentation and adequate testing. With this in mind, Arthur Middleton Hughes, vice president/solutions architect at KnowledgeBase Marketing, reeled off nine mistakes direct marketers make when it comes to database marketing during a session at the DM Days New York conference, June 10-12. He also proposed some solutions. Here follows his list: Mistake #1: The lack of a marketing strategy. “Building a database is easy, but making money with it is hard, and most people don’t know that,” Hughes said. Solution: Collect data on your customers’ purchases, demographics and lifestyle; build a database that permits ad

Catalogers develop three-year plans for at least three reasons: to map out growth and customer acquisition plans; to develop financial goals; and because their bosses, investors or company-owning banks want to see such data. The theme of a session during the recent ACCM conference, held May19-22 in Kissimmee, Fla., on three-year planning centered primarily around speaker Charis Gaines, director, marketing planning and analysis for car parts cataloger Eckler Industries, who led the session along with consultant Gina Valentino of Hemisphere Marketing. Gaines shared her three-year planning process at Eckler, which focuses on putting customer data to work when putting such plans together. Specifically, it

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a three-part series on becoming more adept and adapting to the multichannel world. Part one appeared in our February issue, and part three will appear in our September issue. The world of direct marketing is changing quickly. Whole new analytical tools, benchmarks and ratios have become commonplace in measuring success. You must think cross-channel if you’re to be customer-centered. And above all else, if you’re a stand-alone cataloger or retail store operator, the corporate atmosphere is forcing you to rethink your internal culture. The opposite of a multichannel approach is a channel-centric one, where one channel dominates

Editor’s Note: Jim Coogan, a catalog consultant since 1993 and former VP of marketing at Woodworker’s Supply, among other catalog and retail positions, has been a regular contributor for Catalog Success and the Catalog Success: Tactics & Tips e-newsletter for the past year. He attended the May 19-22 ACCM conference in Kissimmee, Fla., and filed the following recap on the event. I’ll file my own personal reflections on the conference in the July print edition. — Paul Miller, editor-in-chief There’s nothing like an economic downturn to get people’s attention. And the state of the economy and how it would affect catalogers was topic A

As per my headline, for this issue of Catalog Success: The Corner View, I hand my pen — um, keyboard — over to Catalog Success E-Commerce Insights columnist Alan Rimm-Kaufman. Alan heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online agency providing large-scale paid search bid management and Web site testing services, and was formerly a marketing executive with the Crutchfield catalog of consumer electronics. I leave the stage to Alan, who starts with a potential scenario followed by nine predictions for the future of the catalog/multichannel business as it affects you. Scene: A bar at a conference hotel during a marketing trade show. Bill:

Having a hard time finalizing your 2008 contact strategy? You’re not alone. The mission hasn’t changed: You want to develop the most efficient way to convert prospects into first-time buyers and first-time buyers into repeat customers. But piece together the rapid pace of technological change, the volatile economy, the ongoing migration and evolution from phone to Web ordering, then add the likely distraction of the presidential election throughout the year, and it can make any marketer feel like throwing in the towel in bewilderment. Realistically, there are only three ways to proactively convert known prospects to buyers and one-time buyers to repeat buyers:

There’s that old Bob Dylan song about times a-changin’ that I won’t bother to quote further. But it seems to hold true moreso year after year, and 2008 is no exception. So while some of us continue to exchange “happy new year” greetings with one another, I’ll send along one last new year’s greeting with what I believe to be the top five actions you should act on, examine or just ponder to bring your catalog/multichannel business in sync with the times. 1. Get your matchback system working smoothly at once. Assign someone in either your marketing or operations departments to do nothing

In the IndustryEye section of this issue on pgs. 12-13, you’ll find our second quarterly Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, a benchmarking survey we conducted in late November in partnership with the multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. This one focuses on key catalog/multichannel issues, and we’ve included most of the charts there, so I encourage you to take a look. You’ll be able to find some charts only on our Web site due to magazine space limitations. We also didn’t have the space to include the numerous comments that you — our readers and survey respondents — wrote in response to two of the questions.

It’s about more than just collecting the raw numbers and data. Know how to analyze that data based on what you’re looking for and what questions need to be answered from it. An expert panel at the Philadelphia Direct Marketing Association’s meeting held earlier this month addressed this issue in a session titled “Database Marketing Myths, Mistakes and Masterpieces.” Panelists David Geisinger, vice president of database marketing agency Merkle; Steve Max, e-business director of Airgas, a catalog/multichannel distributor of industrial, medical and specialty gases and related equipment to industrial and commercial markets; Perry Kahn, vice president of sales and business development at Infolure,

Reading retail sales, housing sales and consumer confidence reports the past couple of weeks while watching the stock market sink, I’ve become quite worried about the outlook for the holiday season for catalog/multichannel marketers. Retailers collectively reported their worst October in 12 years, and a Conference Board report last week said consumer confidence dropped in early November to its lowest level since Hurricane Katrina triggered soaring oil prices two years ago. Meanwhile, recent reports from the National Association of Realtors showed sales of existing homes had plunged to their lowest level in nearly a decade. None of this bodes well for catalogers. So