Reaching for the Omnichannel Brass Ring

There are over 12,000 catalog companies in the U.S. and Canada, and most are not giant companies with endless resources. One midsized cataloger recently told me the following: "Our website can't capture where the orders or prospects come from. But it wouldn't help if it could, because our legacy order management system lacks fields to store that data even if we could track it."

This isn't an unusual situation. In fact, I hear it all the time. So what can you do if you're in the same boat? Wait 15 years and hope a small-scale, affordable data platform appears? Who can wait that long and hope to still be around and competitive?

Here are some suggestions for forging ahead while we're all waiting for a small-scale data platform miracle:

1. Become a data guerrilla. Even with a legacy system, you can gather a lot of data outside the system. Test and measure whenever and whatever you can. Mailings can be measured via matchbacks. Likewise, email campaigns can be measured via analytics (e.g., opens, clicks, conversions). Surveys can answer questions like "Approximately what percent of our catalog customers first came via the web?," "How many of our best customers contact us via Facebook?," etc. You can develop pretty good rules of thumb from such data, such as percent of sales to attribute per channel, to best mailing frequency for customer segments.

2. Become a data evangelist. Keep working on convincing your team of the value of improving systems. Tell creative, "this data will make your creative more successful." Tell sales, "this data will drive growth." Tell finance, "this data will improve the bottom line." Prove it by sharing reports, tests and surveys. Structure results in one-page, top-line views for quick access (to get them read). And be sure to summarize what the data says, why it's important and steps that can be taken because of the new knowledge it provides.