MCM staff
Delray Beach, FL-based office products Office Depot (NYSE:ODP), the parent of the Viking Office Products, reported that its strong retail performance in the U.S. and Canada was offset slightly by its business services and overseas operations.
Warren, PA-based apparel and home products mailer Blair Corp. posted lower first-quarter sales but an improved bottom line thanks largely to less prospecting and stricter credit requirements.
Vernon Hills, IL-based computer products cataloger CDW Corp. reported an 11% rise in first-quarter profit, driven by strong growth in sales of computers, servers, and software.
“Marketing staffers sometimes try to have salespeople help them profile customers. ‘After all,’ they think, ‘the salespeople know their customers better than anyone else, so why shouldn’t they fill in their demographics or firmographics?'” notes Bill Singleton, president of Algonquin, IL-based database marketing consultancy Singleton Marketing. But they forget that no one can serve two masters at the same time. Salespeople are paid for selling, not demographic profiling, just as marketing staffers are paid for planning, promoting and tracking but not for pushing products.
Building your permission-based e-mail database begins with creating a strategy for e-mail address collection and, ultimately, your corresponding value-based e-mail communications program, says Deirdre Namur, vice president of creative services at e-mail solutions provider Bigfoot Interactive. As such, she advises paying particular attention to collecting important demographic and product-interest fields that will help you build relevant e-mail communications.
In the early days of catalogs, source code capture was the means to analyze results and close the planning cycle for future mailings, says Jim Harkins, principal of Bronxville, NY-based consultancy Jim Harkins & Partners. Then along came the Internet, making analysis more complicated, especially since online capture rates of source codes are abysmally low.
It’s one of the core tenets of direct marketing: You can’t grow if you don’t prospect. At the very least, you need to compensate for the natural attrition rate associated with just about every business. But prospecting above your house file attrition rate can be expensive.
Cataloger/retailer/marketing services provider Alloy posts a wider loss for fiscal 2004; toys marketer Mattel suffers a “disappointing” first quarter
The direct-to-consumer unit for women
When a computer reseller wanted to round out a catalog mailing last year, the analysis group director told the analyst to include the ship-to contacts without holding the mailing up for hygiene or merge/purge. The director did not realize that in the company’s recently merged SAP system the sold-to account information was often used to create a shipping label.