E-mail

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

When we make really good offers to customers or prospects and they buy, that’s the moment to ask for a referral. After all, they want their friends and business associates to get the same great offer they just got, right? Below is an example from www.photostamps.com, which has a great idea and offer. Please scroll down, click on the postage-stamp-size image and note how the marketer makes it so easy for me to give it a referral e-mail address or two. The only thing that’s missing is the ability for responders to upload their personal distribution list.
The better you make your

Catalogers spend loads of time and money acquiring one-time buyers. But there’s more you can do to get these individuals to purchase again. Typically, fewer than half of your first-time buyers make a second purchase. With the high cost of mailing catalogs today coupled with lower response rates, most catalog companies acquire new buyers at an incremental loss. Catalogers must be willing to make an investment in acquiring a new buyer to grow, knowing the payback will come sometime in the future. The amount of time to payback the investment — normally one year — can be reduced by developing a strategy to

Rather than the awe-inspiring equivalent of a moon landing as Microsoft had hoped, the rollout of Outlook 2007 instead has been greeted by the business community as a giant leap backward for e-marketing. That’s because Outlook 2007 regularly mangles most higher end image- and animation-dependent marketing e-mails, due to Microsoft’s decision to “dumb down” Outlook’s design and image-rendering capabilities. “Microsoft has taken e-mail design back five years,” says David Greiner, co-founder of Campaign Monitor, an e-mail tool provider. The problem’s been further compounded by the rollout of Vista, Microsoft’s new Windows operating system. It has forced consumers and businesses to adopt Outlook 2007 whether they want to

Say what you will about this wonderful trade we call the catalog/multichannel business, but whichever way you spin it, you can’t go very far if you’re unprofitable. That’s why above all else — the marketing, the merchandising, the creative, the e-commerce, etc. — we’re most interested in helping our readers make more money. So we bring you our annual binge of tactics and tips extracted from all of this year’s issues of Catalog Success, our weekly e-newsletter Idea Factory and our biweekly idea exchange e-newsletter, The Corner View. Our editorial staff went through every article we’ve produced this year to give you a nice,

As Internet service providers (ISPs) try to shield their customers from unwanted messages, oftentimes permission-based e-mail marketers are caught in the crosshairs. E-mail delivery firm Pivotal Veracity reports that one out of every five permission messages is filtered mistakenly as spam. Therefore, reaching the so-called “promise land” in the form of ISPs’ “whitelists” is the destination for all multichannel marketers. Whitelists are designated lists of trusted senders. Getting on whitelists greatly improves the chances your message will get delivered. E-mail strategy, solutions and services provider Silverpop recently published the whitepaper, Unlocking the Secret World of Whitelist: Insight for Enterprise E-mail Marketers, to help

Making your transactional e-mail more than a simple purchase receipt or shipping order was the dominant theme of StrongMail’s recent Webinar, “New Trends in Transactional E-mail.” Presenters Ivan Chalif, senior product manager at StrongMail Systems, an e-mail software delivery, tracking and management firm; Kevin Flaherty, vice president of marketing for Wetpaint, a supplier that powers wikis, blogs, forums and social networks; and Kimberly Bower, Wetpaint’s e-mail marketing manager, discussed how to take advantage of every transactional e-mail, a key moment when consumers are most engaged. The panel provided the audience with several tips to make the most of transactional e-mails. First, Bower

Good news for American multichannel marketers: The growth rate of the Internet continues to make China’s economic expansion seem paltry. After all, China is only growing at a measly 11 percent! But there’s bad news, too: 10 years of uninterrupted, 20-plus percent growth has encouraged software companies to produce a seemingly never-ending flood, or plague, of new site features. Who has the time, energy, money or development staff to try all these new site features? So how do you know which one(s) to work on? And how do you make sure you get the most out of the ones you do invest in?

Welcome to our groundbreaking benchmark survey on catalog/multichannel mailing and marketing practices! This is a joint venture with multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing, and the first in what will be an ongoing, quarterly series of surveys covering different aspects of the catalog/multichannel business. The survey contains a statistical analysis of a questionnaire we sent to the entire Catalog Success e-mail list in late August. The first two questions screened out any noncatalog decision makers. That left us with completed surveys from 175 catalogers — 97 consumer, 78 B-to-B. Click on any or all of the sets of responses under “Related Content,” to the right.

Assume you’ve done a great job at growing your e-mail list. You’re beating industry averages, and the annual net growth of your file — after removing bounces and opt-outs — is 50 percent. You’re happy! Your boss is happy! Ah, but that’s only part of the formula for e-mail success. An indifferent audience is the death knell for catalog marketers. You want an active and involved audience. There are many bad practices that can harm your programs. If you make one misstep, your customers and prospects may give you the benefit of the doubt. If you make several, however, you’ll lose them. And, you have just