Omnichannel
Scratching your head over the interaction between your online and offline marketing efforts? Not sure how much to advertise online? Unclear of the true impact of your catalog mailings? Youโre not alone. This column wonโt completely solve these puzzles, but itโll offer some relevant ideas. How Much to Advertise First, assume youโve already established your high-level financial goals, either for your online program or for the business as a whole. Such goals should be specific, numeric and time-based. Be sure the whole team understands and buys into these goals, and works toward meeting them each week. Typical goals are profit-and-loss-based, and include a revenue
In the mid โ90s, Louis Stack, founder and president of Fitter International, was like many people โ heโd never seen a Web site. Then a Web developer from Florida offered to create one for his Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based company that sells balance and fitness equipment around the world. By 1997 โ the same year Stackโs catalog, Fitterfirst, was launched โ the site was downloading orders. Today, Fitterfirst also sells products from a retail store attached to its headquarters, and through 2,500 international dealers and wholesalers. Like plenty of other multichannel marketers in North America, Stackโs challenge these days is in coordinating his companyโs multichannel efforts.
In a roundtable discussion held on April 11 during a Hudson Valley DMA luncheon in Greenwich, Conn., Hanover Direct Vice President of Corporate Marketing Amy Schilder led a group on the best practices involved in partnership marketing. Specifically, she pointed out that partnerships with other marketing companies require several key components in order for them to work for both parties. Below are several take-away pointers from the discussion in which she focused primarily on Hanoverโs own partnership with Sears, in which Sears offers a line of clothing from Hanoverโs Silhouettes catalog. * Make sure both partnersโ goals are in line with one another. In the Sears-Silhouettes
As catalogers, you know the importance of search engine marketing for your Web sites and ultimately on your revenue. But technological advances and usersโ preferences can make a difference in search engine results, page algorithms and spiders, as well as search engine optimization and overall SEM strategies. Manoj Jasra, director of technology at Enquiro Search Solutions, a search engine marketing firm in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, recently shared his thoughts on SEM changes in a blog entry. He warns marketers of some key factors to watch for: *Growth of personalized search. Because this is becoming more prominent, Web site operators have to work hard on Web
* This article is very image-heavy. For optimized Web viewing and readability, the images do not appear here. To see the print version, plus images, click on โRefine Your Multichannel Messageโ PDF under Related Content in the upper-right corner of this page. You must have Adobe Reader 6.0 or above to view this document. As the online channel has settled into the mainstream in recent years, multichannel integration has become more crucial for catalogers. Still, there are plenty of marketers out there who neglect, or simply fail, to maintain one voice and a cohesive visual treatment across the three key channels: catalog, Web
As you can see, the contents in this monthโs issue are quite operations-heavy. Weโre always trying to balance our coverage, and with a more general focus for our big double-issue next month, as well as a broadly focused June issue, weโll turn to technology-related issues in July. Perhaps the most interesting thing we found in putting this monthโs issue together was that, although there typically arenโt a lot of drastic changes in the whole area of catalog/multichannel operations, fulfillment and management, there are nevertheless noteworthy changes taking place. For instance, take a look at consultant Liz Kislikโs feature on necessary changes in catalog order takersโ approach
Upselling, the Multichannel Way Itโs Time to Master the Phone/Online Upsell By Liz Kislik Since the 1980s, when the majority of catalog orders began shifting from mail orders to the telephone, itโs become standard practice to not just take phone orders efficiently, but also to incorporate the upsell as a regular part of call center operations. But itโs 2007, and the typical catalog order isnโt necessarily over the phone anymore. Consider this scenario: Your customer calls to place an order and everything in the process goes smoothly. Your order taker follows standard practice and offers one or more upsells. In the classic
Multichannel Brand Management: Refine Your Message
Reflecting on his past experiences as a database marketing executive with the Landsโ End, Eddie Bauer and Nordstrom catalogs, Kevin Hillstrom, president of Seattle-based MineThatData, discussed ways he learned to adapt company business models to maximize multiple channels during a presentation at last weekโs NEMOA conference, held in Cambridge, Mass. While with Nordstrom and Eddie Bauer, โwe brought their channels together to come up with a single solution,โ he said, noting how Nordstom โbasically endedโ the old business model of having the catalog function as a viable sales contributor. Instead, it would serve to promote store and Web traffic. โWe saw customers were behaving differently,
Two essential ingredients of any successful catalog business โ marketing and merchandising โ have artistic elements where experience, creativity and intuition count more than numbers and cold hard facts. But they also have numeric benchmarks that if ignored, can spell disaster for customer acquisition, customer retention and brand integrity. Marketing and merchandising skill sets and viewpoints are vital, and impact the bottom line. When theyโre in sync with each other, the resulting catalog invariably is better than either can deliver on its own. Interaction between the two disciplines is a two-way street, rather than a linear path. There are several ways to