Six Tips to Get the Most from Your Holiday Buyers

When it comes to your house file, your holiday buyers should be treated differently from nonholiday buyers, according Jim Coogan, president of Sante Fe, NM-based consultancy Catalog Marketing Economics. Below are seven tactics to help you get the most from these holiday buyers.

1) Segment your holiday buyers by the date range of your holiday buying season. Rather than fit buyers into traditional RFM segments, put them as a specific holiday recency segment—such as, say, Oct. 15 to Dec. 31 holiday buyers.

2) Plan a different frequency for the holiday buyers during the holiday season. Consider extra mailings and late-season mailings and e-mails to holiday buyers. Consider “hot line” mailings to hit early-season buyers one final time in December. Test a mailing to arrive in-home during the week between Christmas and New Year’s to appeal to holiday buyers who didn’t get what they wanted from Santa Claus.

3) Plan a different frequency of holiday buyers during the nonholiday quarters. Drop money to the bottom line by not mailing as frequently during the first three quarters.

4) Use the co-op databases’ “time bandit” models to find the best holiday buyers in your house file and among prospect files. These will suppress your house buyers who aren’t buying gifts from your catalog.

5) Always segment out Web buyers from the previous holiday season. You should mail less frequently to one-time Web buyers who purchased during the holiday season than you do to other recent buyers.

6) Test-mail last season’s gift buyers early in the season. Personalized reminders and ink-jet messages will stimulate repeat gift purchases this season.

Six Tips to Get the Most from Your Holiday Buyers

When it comes to your house file, your holiday buyers should be treated differently from nonholiday buyers, according Jim Coogan, president of Sante Fe, NM-based consultancy Catalog Marketing Economics. Below are six tactics to help you get the most from these holiday buyers.

1) Segment your holiday buyers by the date range of your holiday buying season. Rather than fit buyers into traditional RFM segments, put them as a specific holiday recency segment—such as, say, Oct. 15 to Dec. 31 holiday buyers.

2) Plan a different frequency for the holiday buyers during the holiday season. Consider extra mailings and late-season mailings and e-mails to holiday buyers. Consider “hot line” mailings to hit early-season buyers one final time in December. Test a mailing to arrive in-home during the week between Christmas and New Year’s to appeal to holiday buyers who didn’t get what they wanted from Santa Claus.

3) Plan a different frequency of holiday buyers during the nonholiday quarters. Drop money to the bottom line by not mailing as frequently during the first three quarters.

4) Use the co-op databases’ “time bandit” models to find the best holiday buyers in your house file and among prospect files. These will suppress your house buyers who aren’t buying gifts from your catalog.

5) Always segment out Web buyers from the previous holiday season. You should mail less frequently to one-time Web buyers who purchased during the holiday season than you do to other recent buyers.

6) Test-mail last season’s gift buyers early in the season. Personalized reminders and ink-jet messages will stimulate repeat gift purchases this season.