Lists

I’m optimistic that 2009 will be a better year for multichannel merchants, even though the experts say our recovery will be gradual. There are bright spots within given merchandise categories, such as religious goods, pet supplies and hobbies — all of which are doing well — just to name a few.

As we wrap up our coverage of last month's All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo, presented by eM+C magazine (sister publication of Catalog Success), this week we continue with Reggie Brady's “10 secrets to e-mail success,” revealing secrets six through 10.

Continuing our coverage of last month's All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo, presented by eM+C magazine (sister publication of Catalog Success), this week we look at a presentation from Reggie Brady, president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions, a direct and e-mail marketing consultancy (and Catalog Success columnist).

A recent report from the U.S. Postal Service offers direct mailers 10 tips on how to optimize the use of their lists, whether they be their own housefiles or rented lists. 1. Match products or services to customers’ wants and needs. Segment your list based on customer buying patterns to allow for customized offers with any direct mail campaign. 2. Select new lists or media that fit the profiles of existing customers. Search for new prospects based on the profiles of your current best customers, the report advises. Scour the Web for new and emerging lists. 3. Maximize personalization of your communication and offers.

Adding new buyers is critical to any catalog business. At a minimum, catalogers need to replace lost buyers due to attrition. A lack of prospecting to outside lists will cause a reduction in the size of the housefile and start a downward spiral that’s difficult to reverse. Prospecting has certainly become more difficult and more costly, but you can’t afford not to. This month, I’d like to share ways to increase the performance of outside lists. This will lower the cost of acquiring a new buyer. Most prospecting is done at an incremental loss. Accept that you can’t make money prospecting based solely on

Over the past few months, we at Catalog Success have been hard at work to further develop a hefty well of research data for our readers. In October we launched the Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, a quarterly series of original benchmarking research we’ve been conducting with the multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. In the coming months, we’ll also be running a series of mail volume charts provided by several catalog co-op databases. Like the Latest Trends surveys, these will run in the IndustryEye section of our print magazine. And for the past year or so, we’ve been running a regular reader poll.

According to various published reports, the average American company today loses 20 percent to 40 percent of its customers every year, and it comes at quite a cost. Research shows that when a company retains just 5 percent more of its best customers, profits can increase 25 percent to 85 percent depending on the industry. Accepting the fact that “churn” is part of business today, multichannel marketers should have a process in place to try to recover some of these lost customers. Churn is when marketers lose names or customers and replace them with other acquired names A recent whitepaper from data solutions

During a presentation of his firm’s new B-to-B co-op database, LexBase, at last week’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) 2007 Conference in Chicago, Edith Roman Associates President Stevan Roberts presented a case study involving a 20-year-old (unnamed) cataloger that mailed 10 million catalogs per year and was looking to mail companies with more than 250 employees. “We took records from its file and matched them against our e-mail database,” Roberts explained. As a result, he claimed the cataloger increased orders by 26 percent within the first year. The cataloger sought out LexBase, which has been operational but not fully rolled out to all B-to-B

While speaking last week at the NEMOA conference in Portland, Maine, Steve August, operational vice president of customer marketing for Brookstone, lauded the stability with which his company now can operate. That’s nice, but why? He devoted his session to explaining the Merrimack, N.H.-based housewares and electronics marketer’s “SUPER” marketing approach — SUPER being a self-coined acronym that stands for Brookstone’s new marketing campaign The SUPER campaign encompasses a Stable modeled environment, with a known Universe, Predictable performance, growth Expansion and a Reduction in costs. In its second year, the program was tested for a full year with a single model and a single

Last week, I got an e-mail from a former student of mine telling me he was starting a company with mail order as one of its distribution channels. He had a neat idea, and I thought the items he was about to sell had merit. Clearly he had his product line thought out well.

It pleases me to no end when this happens: a budding entrepreneur, about to stake his claim in the business world. Then I get the question that I dread: “How do I buy a list so I can grow the business?” How do I buy a list? Oh man, haven’t I