Omnichannel

Do your site’s sign-up forms read like a bungled attempt at getting a date? You: Hi, would you like to get coffee? Visitor: Umm … sure. OK. You: Great! LET’S GET MARRIED! I love kids! I want a big wedding, then a week in Hawaii. Two girls and a boy, (after I make partner). Now Wednesday is poker night; can we spend every other Christmas with my mom? I like to garden, cook and … Visitor: You’re scaring me. Please go away now. Of course, you’re not that clueless about relationships. But your site may be. The No. 1 mistake marketers make

Catalog marketers are a pragmatic group. They stick with tried-and-true methods. New techniques must demonstrate practicality before implementation. Customer reviews and blogs are Web 2.0 techniques, and they’ve demonstrated the ability to build community and stimulate sales. Web 2.0 is focused on interactivity, collaboration and social networking. Marketing becomes more dynamic as customers and prospects are empowered with tools that encourage engagement. Here’s how to harness that crowd-sourced power to provide consumer-generated content that will be influential in the purchasing process. Customer Reviews Some catalogers experiment with letting customers post product reviews on their sites. Typically they’ll use a form with a

In the first part of a three-part series on the analytic measurements necessary for catalogers to understand their multichannel businesses, this week I outline four tactics to help marketers manage their Web buyers and look at why managing these buyers is so critical to their success. Face it: The Internet age for catalogers is here to stay. The impact of Web buyers on catalogers’ operations continues to grow. Web-created demand and online order-taking continue to increase. The issue for catalogers is how to calculate the impact of Web buyers and drill down and understand how best to circulate to these customers. The Web has

These days, most B-to-B catalogers have a good handle on just how many new customers they’re acquiring through their online marketing efforts. With matchback and allocation systems in place, most can determine the results of all their integrated online efforts vs. their offline efforts. This is necessary to allocate sales to the proper marketing effort.
The challenges arise when deciding what to mail buyers who have chosen to do business with you online. A percentage of such buyers will gladly tell you what they want if you ask them, but not all will. You could just mail everyone everything. But that’s likely to

Start with the premise that catalogs and the Internet are interdependent and not adversarial. Remember the brick-and-mortar days when retail channels thought they should receive credit for catalog sales within their trading area? The Web vs. catalog debate is just as silly. Catalog/multichannel companies today recognize the importance of having an e-commerce presence, and many successful dot-coms now have a catalog or are starting one. The best run companies maximize both selling channels. This month, let’s explore how to manage those channels together, including mailing strategies for catalog/Web customers, internal allocations to both channels, the importance of matchbacks and profit contribution by

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

I recently heard an interesting statistic. According to JupiterResearch, Americans now spend the same amount of time using the Internet as they do watching TV — 14 hours per week on average.
Hearing this led me to pause for a moment and reflect on how old I must be, and how things have changed. It seems like just yesterday to many of us B-to-B direct marketers that we started hearing about “the Web.” It was the early ’90s. Today I realize that my wireless network of home computers (I have three) are on 24/7, ready for instant use at any time.
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Most fulfillment processes are largely manual in nature, as only the very largest companies can justify advanced automation. Looking at the total cost of back-end order fulfillment — including direct and indirect labor, occupancy, and shipping supplies — total labor generally makes up 60 percent to 65 percent. That excludes any shipping costs because they distort the comparisons. Benchmarking ShareGroups, a proprietary program in which participants share benchmarking data, reveals that labor rates were typically around $7 an hour five years ago. Today, they’ve reached $12 to $13 an hour for many direct marketing businesses, plus a 20 percent benefit rate. But overall productivity

As many companies today cut back on catalog circulation and other marketing activities hoping to simply survive this rough stretch in the economy, smart marketers should seize this opportunity to grow market share and strengthen their businesses. This is the message that came out of a recent whitepaper, How to Beat the Bear: Seven Secrets to Recession-Proof Marketing, from e-mail marketing firm Silverpop on recession-proof marketing tactics, from which several tips are provided here. 1. Determine your metrics. Figure out exactly where your upper management stands in measuring success in terms of return on investment (ROI) and what levels of return it expects. This

In her new guide, “The New Rules of Multichannel Marketing,” Debra Ellis, president and founder of Wilson & Ellis Consulting, a management, marketing and operational solutions consulting firm, says conducting business as usual won’t work anymore. Your competitors are thinking up new ways to entice your customers, as technological advancements have created new channels and opportunities. These new channels and technologies are creating a virtual marketplace when, where and how consumers want it, Ellis says. The companies that can best integrate their various channels into a seamless shopping experience will be those that realize growth and profitability. That said, use your available tools to