PostPilot

I don't talk about vendors a whole lot, for good reason. Early in my consulting work I'd be asked to partner with various vendors, the vendors would let my clients down, my clients would stop working with me for recommending a vendor ... you get the picture.

So, I don't have a relationship with anybody at PostPilot (click here). I haven't been asked to say anything about PostPilot.

I will say that a portion of their services are calibrated to helping the catalog brands that still remain.

Print-based marketing is in trouble, and has been for twenty years. Why should you spend $1 sending paper to a customer just because the customer hasn't purchased in 30 months and "might" be a reactivation candidate? Well, the reason you are doing that is because people at your company LOVE creating catalogs. They LOVE the process. They LOVE creatively enticing a customer via a spread. They LOVE the process, regardless of profit.

Profit.

Until the generation of catalog buyers (I'm not talking about the retailers that mail catalogs as branding pieces and don't care about profitability) is no longer employed, the profitability of mailing efforts will continue to erode. This will force those who adore print into a corner (it has been doing this for twenty years).

• To maintain the craft, the catalog-centric professional must focus only on the most productive customers ... the most loyal customers ... or the most recently active customers. These will be the only two viable audiences going forward.

Which brings me back to PostPilot. Now, I get it, you want to merchandise 64 pages, you don't want trigger-based marketing via post cards, that's not what you love doing. The "market" doesn't care what you love doing. The "market" is giving you a small window of opportunity to do something via print.

• Customers who have done "something recently" ... clicked through an email campaign, visited your website, signed up for credit, purchased, interacted with your social media presence ... these customers are profitable via print for a very small period of time. Why wouldn't you capitalize on this small period of time? With print? With the craft you love?

Again, I don't have a relationship with anybody at PostPilot, I haven't been asked to say anything, I just see a small window in the customer relationship process where you could "do something with print" and it "could/should be profitable". I mean, I'd rather leverage email marketing for everything given it costs essentially nothing and a postcard is going to cost at least $0.60, but a portion of my audience loves print, so have at it.