Omnichannel

With $1.8 billion public sector sales comprising more than a quarter of its total revenue in 2006, multichannel computer products marketer CDW nevertheless was slow to capitalize on one of its biggest resources. Founded in 1984, CDW didn’t aggressively market to federal employees until 1998, missing out on a market that now represents more than 25 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product and more than 4 percent of the world economy. At the Amtower Summit on Selling Products to the Government held in Baltimore earlier this month, CDW’s Director of Advertising and Marketing Operations Jim Garlow outlined how his company broke into

At the recent Amtower Summit on Selling Products to the Government held in Baltimore, a panel of multichannel marketing experts provided the audience myriad tips and opinions on how to best find and sell to government employees. The panel consisted of David Powell, vice president of sales and marketing administration at FBC, a company that produces trade show events and conferences at federal government locations throughout the U.S.; Linda Pickering, senior vice president of B-to-B list company MeritDirect; Jim Garlow, director of advertising and marketing operations at computer equipment multichannel marketer CDW; and Peter Long, CEO of MCH, a compiler of business-to-institution (B-to-I) databases

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

The 2007 holiday selling season likely will be remembered as the year social marketing hit the mainstream. A Oneupweb study of the 12 hottest products for the upcoming holiday season shows a remarkably creative variety of social media strategies and tactics being employed by savvy online marketers as they successfully generate advanced buzz and ensuing engagement. For the multichannel marketer who has yet to adopt a specific social-marketing strategy, it may appear a daunting, if not impossible, task to jump into during this holiday selling season. But here are four social tactics you might want to consider. 1. Participate in existing social networks.

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,

At a presentation I gave at the recent Online Media, Marketing & Advertising Conference in New York, I offered several tips and insight on Web site testing strategies and landing page optimization. First, here are the top three common mistakes search marketers make when dealing with a mature search campaign: 1. You rest on your laurels and don’t think to improve. Marketers periodically need to reassess and re-evaluate the specific keywords they’re bidding on, as well as the creative (ad versions) that are shown to make sure they’re still performing up to snuff. Keep in mind that other competing advertisers may update and refresh

Up until just recently, all those customers who spent hours browsing around and shopping in L.L. Bean’s flagship, tourist-attraction store in the town of Freeport, Maine, also where the company’s headquarters are located, left with shopping bags full, but never had any further communications from Bean again. But better late than never: As L.L. Bean’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing Steve Fuller described during a session he gave at the recent NEMOA conference in Portland, Maine, Bean has implemented an extensive matchback program that gets every form of transaction matched back to Bean’s master customer file. “For 93 years,” he said, “if customers came

The rapid development of sophisticated technologies has been tantalizing. So much so that it’s been suggested companies can improve efficiency by replacing expensive, variable-cost human labor with incredibly efficient hardware and software, both fixed costs. Such promise has led to change in the call-center business, beginning with call-routing menus and leading to sophisticated, interactive voice recognition systems. Despite countless horror stories of customers lost in “promptland,” most of this technology has been developed with the best intentions. Yet numerous studies have shown this promise often has remained out of reach. A recent Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index survey found that 55 percent of customers

AB-to-B catalog marketing staff had a problem. Its housefile count was experiencing double-digit growth, but its response numbers were shrinking. How can these two metric trends coexist? Internet-savvy consumers, who often operate small, home-based businesses, buy product via this cataloger’s Web site. These small office/home office (SOHO) businesses didn’t need to repurchase the way this cataloger’s traditional business customers typically did. So, housefile response fell, while marketing expenses went up. If you suspect this is happening to you, here’s how to fix the problem, improve your response and reduce marketing costs. Begin by analyzing your housefile for SOHOs and consumers. Then follow these steps: 1. Run address

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.