Your best buyers can always withstand one more contact, says Scarsdale, NY-based catalog consultant Michael Grant: “They’ve bought frequently and often from you.” They are generally catalog-savvy buyers and will be buying from someone else if you don’t satisfy their appetite for new product. So they’re anxious to receive another catalog from you.
Let’s say that your best buyers provide you with an average demand per catalog of $3.00. And let’s suppose that your fixed breakeven demand per catalog is around $1.50 for a catalog. As long as you can exceed your breakeven demand per catalog with another catalog, Grant says, you can generate positive contribution on this incremental mailing.
Even with a remail of a current catalog, you’ll have positive contribution for the extra mailing. A good rule of thumb forre-mails is to expect roughly 70% of the demand you received from the original catalog. Seventy percent of $3.00 is $2.10, which is far in excess of the required $1.50 for breakeven. Therefore, you should find a way to mail one more time to your best buyers to generate extra demand and contribution.