Omnichannel

One of cataloging’s hottest buzz phrases this past year has been alternative media. List brokers hate the trend, but most savvy catalogers are not only embracing alternative media, they are having enough success with it to build on. Historically catalogers have relied on list rentals to build their customer files. And it worked. Lists proved to be productive and had excellent persistency or lifetime value over time. So why complain or switch from something that’s working? The answer is an economic one. The winning lists of yesteryear are just not responding as well as they did in the past. When I started in

For this inaugural article, no rule of thumb could be better to start with than the oldest, strangest, most puzzling and often the most frustrating rule of them all: the 1 percent response rate. Definition: 1 Percent Response Rule Most catalogers have at least heard of this rule, but I’ve never seen a really careful definition of it. So here’s my precise definition of the 1 percent response rule: The 1 Percent Response Rule: If you mail an average-size catalog, with merchandise of average desirability, at average-value price points, to an average selection of response lists, then your average response rate (number of orders

About this time nine years ago I was getting set to be married, so I registered my china and crystal patterns with a Big Department Store’s bridal registry. Then, a funny thing happened: I started receiving boxes at my home from someplace called Ross-Simons. “What store is this?” I asked my mother, for while it carried the precise gifts I had selected, I had neither been there nor heard of it. “It’s not a store. It’s a catalog,” she replied. More recently, in the fall of 1997 my sister was wed. For her bridal registry, she chose to skip the Big Department