By now you know that you should be segmenting your house file not only by recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) but also by order channel and by type of Web activity (organic search, affiliate-driven, e-mail responders, and the like). After all, your pure online customers most likely have different characteristics and buying patterns from those who order by phone or those who are driven by a print catalog to order online.
But once you’ve segmented your house file in that manner, what should you do with the data? Jim Coogan, president of Sante Fe, NM-based consultancy Catalog Marketing Economics, has some suggestions:
Segment the low-ticket Web buyers out of your print catalog circulation.
Use data from cooperative databases t determine which of your online buyers do not respond to catalogs in general. You can then suppress these households from your print circulation as well.
Most Web-buying consumers order later in the holiday season, so mail them later in the holiday season than you do your print or multichannel customers. In fact, they may order only at Christmas, so consider suppressing them for the first three quarters of the year.
Consider mailing fewer pages to Web buyers.
Decrease the frequency of mailings to Web buyers.
Measure the incremental sales from mailings to the Web buyers so that you know he true sales that you’re getting from mailing a Web buyer a catalog