CEO Concerns About Reducing Catalog Marketing

Lots of phone calls with business leaders over the past month. All ask me essentially the same question.

Question: "Postage is about to put a squeeze on my expense structure. Should I begin transitioning out of catalog marketing?"

Strategically, there are a lot of things to think about. Listed below are a sampling of the issues CEOs need to consider.

• How old is your average catalog customer? If your catalog customer is 55 or older, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• What percentage of your direct-to-consumer net sales come from the telephone? If this percentage is more than fifty percent, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• What percentage of your direct-to-consumer advertising budget is in search, affiliates, portals and e-mail marketing? If you aren't already spending at least twenty percent of your direct-to-consumer advertising budget online, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts for awhile, until you learn all the ins and outs of online marketing.

• Multichannel Forensics: If prior catalog buyers are in isolation mode (meaning they do not at least try out ordering online), you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Testing: This is as good a time as any to hold out catalog mailings to a group of loyal catalog customers for a period of at least six months. When you do this, what happens to online spend? Does it increase, decrease, or stay the same? If it decreases or stays the same, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• E-Mail Marketing: A colleague forwarded me an e-mail marketing campaign. The e-mail did not sell merchandise --- rather, it told the customer to look for their catalog in the mail. If your e-mail marketing strategy is to market your catalog, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Customer Acquisition: What happens to new customers if you stop traditional catalog prospecting activities? The future of your business is new customers --- if you don't acquire new customers via the online channel, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Paid Search: When you analyze paid search performance, do you find that customers ordering via paid search also received a catalog? If so, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Online Marketing Budget: What happens if you double your online marketing budget? What is the impact on online sales? If you don't know the answer to this question, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts until you can answer this question.

• Staffing: Do you have a transition plan for all of the folks who have served your catalog efforts for the past two decades? Contact center and distribution center considerations are not trivial.

• Merchandise Strategy: Can you appropriately forecast sku-level sales if you don't have a catalog driving customers to the online channel? Does the mix of merchandise purchased change between online-only customers, verses online customers fueled by catalog marketing?
  

• Customer File Management: Have you run a five-year simulation of the expected change in your customer file? In other words, will you have enough customers, repurchasing at high-enough rates, spending enough money per repurchaser, to fuel the future of your online business? If you don't know the answer to this question, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts until you complete your Multichannel Forensics analysis.