Katie Haegele

By Katie Haegele For 132 years the Park Seed Co. has been a mainstay for expert and novice gardeners alike. The marriage between its trusted print catalog and its snazzy new Web site is a model relationship worth studying In the next year, Park will have one of the top five sites, usability-wise, in the United States," says Amy Africa, e-commerce consultant and president of Creative Results. A veteran of the catalog-selling business, Park Seed had lots of compelling reasons to get online—and to do it right. "I've studied gardening e-business since Garden.com started," says Africa. "That was a great site with a

The smart technology designed to help marketers with customer relationship management (CRM) can get confusing pretty quickly. Direct marketing, database marketing and CRM are all overapplied terms, which, in many cases, have overlapping meanings. In order to run a successful catalog business, you must understand the fundamentals of targeted marketing—that means building and using a database of all your customers and inquiries. “First off, I would caution anybody from jumping right in and looking at tools,” says Katie Cole, director of analysis and learning at Quris, an electronic touch communication consultancy. “Tools are just a relatively small part of a much larger process. The