Cambridge, MA–Jewelry, gifts, and home decor cataloger/retailer Ross-Simons’s catalog sales have dipped since their peak two years ago. But they’ve been largely offset by a steady rise in Web-based orders. The company has worked diligently during the past year to improve its multichannel integration on a number of fronts, said vice president of marketing Cindy Marshall during a March 26 session at the New England Mail Order Association (NEMOA) Conference here.
Among Ross-Simons’s recent improvements has been placing e-mail sign-ups on every page of the company’s Website. “It’s much like listing a toll-free ordering line on every page of a print catalog,” Marshall said. Since it began placing the e-mail signups, the company has increased its e-mail database 20% a week.
In addition, the company has been using Abacus’s ChannelView match-back software for the past year to better determine which channels sales are coming from. “In 2001, we had a tough time, because we had a huge shift from catalog to Web-placed orders,” Marshall said, “and we couldn’t keep up to know where the orders were originating from.”
Now Ross-Simons sends its data to Abacus, which uses source codes, names, and addresses to match the orders to specific campaigns. The program has enabled Ross-Simons to track 18% more orders back to its catalog as the primary driver of the orders than it did previously, Marshall said.