Dear Catalog CEOs: Weighting

Dear Catalog CEOs:

Here's one that you hear all of the time:

• "That customer was acquired via catalog marketing in 1999, so we attribute all orders, regardless of channel, back to the catalog, because without the catalog, we never would have acquired this customer."

Oh boy.

My projects suggest a different outcome.  Orders have a "weight" associated with them.

The weight varies, but in general, orders a year ago carry half the weight of current orders ... orders two years ago carry a quarter the weight of current orders ... orders three years ago carry an eighth of the weight of current orders ... you get the picture.

So if you have a customer with two orders ... a catalog order in 2008, and an e-mail order in 2011, the e-mail order carries eight times the weight of the catalog order.  In other words, the customer is an e-mail buyer.

This allows us to make much better customer management decisions.  We only have to mail this customer four or five catalogs a year ... if we view this customer as a catalog customer, we might have to mail the customer twenty catalogs a year.

My Catalog PhD projects apply a proprietary weighting scheme ... this scheme allows us to make much better mailing decisions than we'd make using traditional methods.  Contact me now for your own customized project.