During the past few years, e-commerce marketers have been innovating by creating subscription boxes. Birchbox was an early success story (2010) in the beauty products category. Its two founders agreed that shopping for beauty products “was frustrating, inefficient, and confusing.” There were too many options and that did not encourage trial. There was no way to try products online without spending a lot of time...
A popular discussion these days is how to compete with Amazon. Mega retailers with physical stores and/or well-designed ecommerce platforms often hold the best cards when working with their suppliers. Strong merchants in their own right, including leading apparel brands, often need mass merchants like Walmart and Amazon, to boost the volume sales and distribution of their products. In August, Amazon announced that its Marketplace...
Unlike corporate marketers, catalog circulation consultants get to work on a number of catalog brands in a variety of industries and merchandise categories. Catalog consultants have many advantages, including getting to observe all types of activity, tests, and innovations across a variety of catalog titles. Catalog circulation management consultants can do many things to support the catalog team. Here are the top activities that they...
Rising catalog costs have forced catalogers to be more creative when it comes to catalog formats. Whether you're reducing the trim size or exploring gatefolds, always test the new format against the control before you roll out the change. If you're in a highly seasonal business, make sure you understand the impact on revenue during the busy time of the year when changes are often...
Catalog co-op prospecting models have been around for a couple of decades. But if you haven’t considered them in a while, it might be time to take a new look. Most of the big co-ops have diversified and added digital prospecting programs to their list of catalog services. Who Should Try It? Your customer acquisition program has started to plateau (or even decrease) while acquisition...
Each year we recommend that catalog and ecommerce companies be prepared to test up to 10 customer prospecting ideas, with the understanding that only one or two might be home runs. Expect to have some failures and learning experiences along the way, and that’s ok. It’s important to test several ideas – even if some of them seem a stretch – because the goal is to...
There’s a marketing trend underway that's worth watching and trying if you're looking to grow brand awareness and acquire new customers. It's called micro influencer marketing. It can provide a new and valuable source for customer acquisition. Micro influencer marketing represents a way to work with small, but more authentic, influencers. Even Amazon.com just started a beta program recruiting them, according to TechCrunch. Read more....
This is a common question and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. It really depends on the type of business you run (B2B or B2C) and several other factors including catalog productivity, customer segment, and merchandise. Let's take a look at some examples. B2B catalogers typically mail one large annual catalog and supplement with smaller specialty titles throughout the year. The annual catalog serves as a...
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to know what data your company was collecting on marketing efforts you’d have to search for it. You’d likely be making your way downstairs to an interior office in the basement. There you would have found an analyst who would be happy to tell you all about the numbers. The problem? You probably wouldn’t have understood a word of...
Acquiring new customers at an acceptable cost is becoming a huge challenge for many catalog companies and eCommerce retailers. A common complaint among catalogers that are accustomed to leveraging co-op databases for low-cost prospecting is that their models are performing less effectively and response rates have decreased, driving up their customer acquisition costs. And even in digital marketing, brands have found that increased competition in...
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