Omnichannel

With recent increases in postage and paper costs, many B-to-B catalogers are pushing harder and deeper into the online marketing frontier. It’s amazing to see many of the new technological innovations in online marketing (e.g., video, webcasts, podcasts and Google search changes, among others), the improvement in performance metrics and measurement, and good, old direct marketing creativity that we all know and love! The question is: Where are you on the learning curve? Where are you on delivering online results?
Today, if you’re not receiving more than half of your B-to-B orders online, with few exceptions, you’re performing below average. Also, if you’re not

PATIENT: Doc, almost all our orders used to come through the call center. Now 75 percent come via our Web site. We’re ready to give up on our catalog and go Web-only. Is that a good idea? CATALOG DOCTOR: To keep your Web business healthy, I advise keeping your catalog. You’ll be surprised how much the catalog drives both sales and profits. It’s probably the primary driver of Web site orders. PATIENT: But how can I know for sure? I need to be able to justify an ongoing investment in the catalog. CATALOG DOCTOR: Let’s look at four different ways to learn how

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:

Merchandise is still king. That was only one of a handful of themes taken from a wide-ranging and spirited session at last week’s NEMOA Spring 2008 Conference in Cambridge, Mass. This particular session included Derrick Egbert, president of New Perspectives; Allen Abbott, EVP/COO of Paul Frederick MenStyle; Jonathan Fleischmann, president/ CEO of the Potpourri Group; and Dana Pappas, COO/CFO of Plow & Hearth. It focused on the pressures of managing a catalog business in today’s uncertain economic times. Below are some of the tips/observations taken from the panelists and audience members. * Merchandise: “It’s the starting point,” Fleischmann said. The need for collaboration

During a session at last week’s NEMOA Conference in Cambridge, Mass., Peter Grebus, who heads Williams-Sonoma’s customer information management group, explained a two-pronged approach the home furnishings multichannel marketer has used to increase the adoption of marketing sciences for intuition across the organization. Specifically, he noted that in the short run, Williams-Sonoma has focused on a “four walls” process. The multititle multichannel marketer, whose direct business comprises 42.2 percent of its sales, has emphasized the integration of browse and purchase data to enable contextual selling across channels. This includes the following: * dynamic content and recommendations; * data that’s currently constrained by the

Every year, family and friends gather to watch the Super Bowl — this year was an especially good game, at least if you’re a Giants fan. But for many viewers, the best part has nothing to do with what’s happening on the field. It’s all about those commercials. And each year we marketers love to watch the ads and figure out which one we think is the best.
This year I noticed something different. I was struck by how many of them I didn’t get. I mean, I just didn’t “get it.” Thirty or more seconds went by, and I had no clue

This article assumes that insights gained from Web testing lead to effective print catalog presentations. That is our “Big Assumption.” If you disagree, skip to the next article. No hard feelings; see you next month. Still reading? Good. There are two decent reasons to accept this Big Assumption. First, the Web is so prevalent that the demographics of Web shoppers are pretty much the same as the demographics of all direct shoppers, making the Big Assumption reasonable. Second, the Web offers catalogers their first chance to do real testing. While many catalogers think they’ve been testing for years, they really haven’t been

Throughout this decade, giving customers the choice of shopping by catalog, retail or online has been the way to go for those catalogers that operate retail chains and e-commerce Web sites. How closely do you examine your customers’ buying habits to safely conclude your multichannel efforts make the most sense? The office supplies multichannel retailer Staples sees multichannel as “the brilliance of the ‘and’ vs. the tyranny of the ‘or,’” said Kenneth Moore, director of business delivery information technology for Staples, during a session at last week’s eTail Conference in Palm Desert, Calif. Moore laid out four types of Staples customers that have

When I attend industry conferences, I do quite a lot of cherry-picking. After all, there’s quite a lot of information spread around, but not a lot of it’s relevant to catalogers and multichannel marketers. So for this week’s edition of The Corner View, I took it upon myself to attend many sessions from the eTail Conference, held Feb. 11-14 in Palm Desert, Calif., and whittle down these experiences into the top 10 ideas, tips, points and company activities I took in during the event. I only attended sessions with panels that included catalog/multichannel marketers. The most noteworthy subjects they discussed included exploring

Jim Garlow, director of advertising and marketing operations for technology products and services provider CDW, shares his feelings on matters ranging from why it’s important to be a knowledge source in the tech market to growth tactics for startup catalogers and much more. Catalog Success: Why is it important for CDW to be viewed as a reference source in the tech marketplace? Jim Garlow: We send our account managers through rigorous training because our target audience consists of IT purchasers and chief information officers, both of which are very tech savvy. They know they want somebody on the phone who knows what they’re