Dear Catalog CEOs: Advertising New Items

Dear Catalog CEOs:

I can't tell you how often I hear the phrase "it doesn't work" come up when talking about marketing to prospects.

• We tried a prospecting catalog, it didn't work.
• We featured items on the home page to new visitors, it didn't work.

Enough already!

New customers / prospects have merchandise preferences that are different.  New customers / prospects are in a different need set.

Here's an analysis I run for folks.  This is a scatter plot of the top 500ish selling items, rank ordered from 1 (best) to 500 (worst) by existing customers and new customers.

Look at the arrows.  These are items that sell ok among existing customers, but are among the best selling items among new customers / prospects.

It's not hard to identify the ten items that sell very well among new customers, but sell average / poorly among existing customers.  Find those items!

Once you find those items, create a story around them, use those items in your prospecting efforts.

This doesn't have to be hard, folks.  Now go do it!!!!