September 22, 2008

Colorado: Mountains In Hillstrom's Zip Code Forensics

Hillstrom's Zip Code Forensics (read about and purchase here) clearly indicate that mountain states are direct marketing hotbeds.

Colorado might be the most interesting of the mountain states.

Looking at this map, we see several unique trends. Eastern Colorado has e-commerce potential, especially along I-70. Denver, like many major metropolitan areas, is not an e-commerce or direct marketing hotbed.

Move to the suburbs and exurbs, and you see a bunch of Online Bliss and Online Spend zips, the most productive online zip codes that exist.

And then we head west, into the Rockies, away from Denver. There, we find a ton of Catalog Crazies and Catalog Fans. This is interesting, because marketing best practices tell us to have a full multichannel offering for our customers --- yet the customers in Western Colorado love direct mail and catalogs, and use the telephone to place their orders. This is traditional catalog marketing at its finest.

When we think about catalog marketing, e-mail marketing, and search marketing through the perspective of Hillstrom's Zip Code Forensics, we think about many ways to customize and personalize our marketing to the folks we are communicating with. We don't send an e-mail marketing message offering buy online / pickup in stores to a customer in the Rockies of Colorado, do we? We don't necessarily scale our catalogs down to 48 pages to drive web traffic to a customer who lives in the Rockies of Colorado, do we? And we might think about social shopping when considering customers who live in Boulder.

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