I recently received two Soft Surroundings catalogs within a couple of days of each other. One catalog was a 68 page sale catalog and I noticed that they used two tactics to improve key code capture and highlight catalog awareness. On the right side of the back cover of the catalog, Soft Surroundings added “use […]

We need to talk about the “D” word. Digital? Data-Driven? How about, “all of the above”, plus one you may not have expected: Direct mail. If you’ve been drinking the “Kool-Aid” served up by industry bigwigs, you might think that direct mail is not only a relic of yesteryear, it’s actually a casualty of digital. […]

Direct mail is expensive.  Up to 97% of the catalogs sent do not convert.  How do you determine which customers warrant the investment of mailing your catalog? Holdout tests. What is a holdout test? A holdout test measures the profitability of a catalog mailing relative to a customer segment.  For a mailing, a small group […]