Omnichannel

Multichannel marketing and customer relations were the primary business issues cited by three catalog executives speaking at the Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association’s luncheon Feb. 23 in Rye, N.Y. Despite their diverse markets, Lillian Vernon President Jonathan Shapiro, CM Almy President Stephen Fendler, and Petals CEO Chris Topping agreed on the need for continuity among sales channels in order to grow their businesses. With 45 percent of its orders coming online during the holiday 2004 season, Lillian Vernon is particularly attentive to the rapid channel shift to online buying. “I call it ‘shift happens’,” Shapiro said. “It’s important for us, and everybody, to understand the

Cataloging usually is a predictable world. We track everything, study it, place data in spreadsheets and end up knowing pretty well in advance how things will work out. In fact, if businesses had human personalities, cataloging would be your Aunt Matilda and Uncle Gus: safe, predictable, no surprises. But then there comes a day when Uncle Gus calls to say he has flown to Rio with his secretary, and Aunt Matilda has joined the circus. What do you do when the predictable becomes, well, unpredictable? The Mystery of the Rotten Rollout After several years of slow growth, the mid-sized niche cataloger decided he needed

By what level you can grow your business is dependent on the increase in your 12-month buyer file, as you can see in this issue’s list of the Top 200 catalogers. If your housefile is growing, your revenue likely will increase, and vice versa. No doubt you pay a lot of attention to your catalog’s daily and/or weekly demand report. Is it up from last year? How does it look against budget? But you probably don’t pay enough attention to the increase/decrease in your 12-month housefile. This month I’ll examine why this file is critical to your growth rate. And I’ll offer strategies

From scrapbooking supplies to Coach bags, and catalog consolidation to television advertising, 2005 is ushering in some interesting trends for catalogers. Ben Perez, president of list brokerage and management firm Millard Group, and programming chairperson of The Direct Marketing Association’s Catalog Council, sees the following merchandise and industry trends that catalogers should be watching. 1. Luxury items are still hot, and mass marketers are doing well. “It’s the middle slice of the market that will continue to have trouble,” said Perez during his presentation at the Catalog-on-the-Road conference, held in Cambridge, Mass., in February. 2. Scrapbooking is hot. “Collecting is becoming a popular activity,” he observed.

Customers like the convenience of ordering merchandise online and picking it up at their local stores, says Lauren Freedman, president of the e-tailing group, a Chicago-based consultancy that provides e-commerce merchandising solutions. “As online shopping continues to become more mainstream, we believe that delivering a cohesive, multichannel shopping experience is essential,” she says. To that end, the e-tailing group offers the following checklist to multichannel retailers offering in-store pickup of items ordered on the Internet. 1. Consistently send an e-mail notification when merchandise is available for pickup; include detailed pick-up information. 2. Strive to have merchandise available for pickup within 24 to 48 hours from the order

Ease of use, not low product prices, rules customers’ online shopping satisfaction rates, according to Keynote Systems, which recently tracked the shopping experiences of about 2,000 consumers. Here’s what Keynote found: * 59 percent: consumers who cited ease of use as the most important criterion when selecting an online shopping site. * 32 percent: consumers who said low prices were what drew them to particular sites. * 6.1: average number of problems a typical consumer encountered during a single shopping experience. Keynote Systems’ executives recommended that online merchants focus on the following: site performance, the best practices of e-commerce leaders and customer feedback.

Being personal with customers means striving to know and relate to each and every one as a person, says David Freemantle, author of “The Buzz: 50 Little Things That Make a Big Difference to Worldclass Customer Service” (Nicholas Brealey Publishing; www.nbrealey-books.com). Providing a personal approach means giving a little bit of yourself to the customer. And doing so lets customers see past any artificial system imposed by the business and get to know the real you. Following are a few tips on how your customer service representatives (CSR) can personalize every customer interaction. * Have CSRs introduce themselves by name to every customer. * Encourage CSRs

With the start of the 2005, the Can Spam Act reaches its one year anniversary. As the year unfolds, it’s especially important to make sure your multichannel business is compliant. Bennie Smith, chief privacy officer at DoubleClick, offers the following tips on how to unify your e-mail campaigns and protect your customers’ privacy. - All e-mail communication to customers should be presented in a clear, consistent and standard fashion. This includes standardizing e-mail subject lines, headers and footers. Your e-mails need to clearly designate they are an advertisement or solicitation, as well as provide functional opt-out mechanisms, says Smith. - Multiple e-mail marketing databases of opt-in

1. When pinpointing your catalog’s target demographic, strive to know everything there is to know about your ideal customer, including gender, age, ethnic background, hobbies/interests, even personal characteristics (e.g., active, curious, intellectual, humorous). “Then find a picture of someone who meets that ideal, and hang it up so your staff knows exactly for whom they’re working,” advises Sarah Fletcher, creative director of Catalog Design Studios, a Charlestown, R.I.-based catalog agency. 2. When deciding how much space to allot for each product in your print catalog, “Don’t picture all merchandise the same size and square inch,” says Fletcher.”You’re losing money that way. If you offer

We are seeing an increase in the growth and financial performance of many specialty catalogs. None of these companies are old-fashioned general catalogers, and all share the following distinct characteristic: most of the new-to-file customers are coming in via the Internet, while most of the sales are being generated by a catalog (even if the order was placed on the Web site). The economics of finding Web-generated customers searching to meet specific interests are often more favorable than those obtained by direct mail prospecting. Shoppers have become more adept at locating products using various Internet capabilities, such as search engines and product syndicators of catalog