Integrate Your Marketing Efforts

Retailers, pure Web merchants, and catalogers often have had a difficult time looking outside their main distribution channels, says Jim Coogan, president of Santa Fe, NM-based catalog consultancy Catalog Marketing Economics.

Stores need to learn how to use direct marketing and catalogs to push retail sales, and pure Web marketers to learn how to use catalogs to layer on profitability and for retailers to use e-mail, and direct mail to optimize their businesses.

Coogan offers a few ways marketers need to integrate your marketing efforts, especially between the Web and catalogs:

  • List managers need to offer web buyer selects so catalogers can select rental names by channel of purchase as well as recency, frequency, and monetary value.
  • Catalogers should maintain their databases by channel of purchase to avoid the response decay from mailing to Web buyers who don’t respond to snail mail.
  • Pure Web merchants have to test mailing their best buyers something (a catalog, a flyer, or a postcard) to see if they can use snail mail profitably.
  • Catalogers must understand the potential for paid search, natural search and affiliate relationships as well as they understand their own prospecting list universes.
  • Catalogers need to use their sites to shorten the cycle for testing new products. For example, the Web is an efficient channel to test new products and price.

Jim Coogan is president of Santa Fe, NM-based catalog consultancy Catalog Marketing Economics.