Michael Grant Direct

The adage, “80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your customers,” is as true today as when it was coined many years ago. The real questions are how to identify those prospects and one- and two-time buyers who may have a strong affinity for your merchandise, and then how do you keep them buying? That is, how to turn prospects and one-time buyers into gold customers. Following are some strategies to test, roll out and then measure. If They Look Like Customers … Tactics such as calculating average order value (AOV) and/or lifetime value (LTV); modeling; and segmenting buyers

During the past 10 years, the catalog industry has continued to evolve in dynamic ways. For example, if you’re like most of your colleagues, you’re struggling to find incremental names to mail. You’ve seen cooperative databases take the prospecting market by storm, accounting for millions of names rented every year. And you’re trying to more efficiently integrate e-commerce into your marketing and communications plans, especially since the Internet accounts for 20 percent to 50 percent of demand and orders for many catalogers. Despite these marked changes in how you accept orders and acquire customers, one thing remains the same: how to correctly

By Alicia Orr Suman The Causes of List Fatigue ... and eight tips on how to beat it List fatigue is top of mind for many direct marketers these days. What is list fatigue, what causes it, and how can you combat it? Reductions in catalog prospecting circulation over the past several years, in conjunction with shrinking list and co-op database universes and an overall weak economy, have led to what commonly is being referred to as "list fatigue." How, you may ask, can a list become fatigued? Jo Ann Alberts, vice president of list brokerage and management

Recently, there’s been a push to build sophisticated regression models using the latest technologies and techniques. And rightly so! The gains in both processing speed and capacity have enabled statisticians to incorporate large amounts of catalog, retail and Internet data, as well as demographics, to generate results specifying the best names to mail. A marketing professional is considered remiss if he or she isn’t testing a regression model with various vendors. While these analyses reflect some of every cataloger’s database marketing efforts, there are some areas that commonly are neglected. I’ll discuss one of these: measuring the success of your recent marketing efforts

Marketing Tips for B-to-B Catalogers Michael Grant, a direct marketing consultant, offered numerous pieces of sage advice applicable to catalogers. Following are four of his tips for business-to-business (b-to-b) catalogers: 1. Use titles instead of names (e.g., marketing manager, purchasing manager) for inactive b-to-b buyers. The contact person whose name you have on your housefile may have left the company, and you can never be certain his or her mail is being forwarded to replacements. 2. Calculate the number of catalogs you mail to a site based on the number of its employees. For example, at larger companies, three or four employees may