How combining web and catalog strategies boosts both channels
Lillian Vernon Corp. is now doing about 17 catalog mailings a year, a slight reduction from prior years that is due to a streamlining of the company’s focus rather than a greater number of customers coming online, vice president of marketing John Buleza tells Internet Retailer, with sales coming in via the catalog and call center now are approximately even. Nevertheless, greater coordination of its web and catalog strategies is enabling the company to cut back in places where the web site can step in with no diminution in sales.
One example is how it has coordinated e-mails with the timing of a catalog drop. Lillian Vernon had planned to mail a clearance catalog right after the 2006 holiday season and scheduled a catalog with new merchandise to go out in January. The company decided to consolidate the two planned catalog mailings, with an insert of 36 pages of clearance merchandise in the regular new merchandise catalog planned for early in 2007. Lillian Vernon’s e-commerce group’s role in this mailing was to pave the way for the clearance items with a marketing e-mail that preceded by a few days the combined catalog drop. Lillian Vernon is No. 66 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
“We were able to eliminate a book we would have had to produce and mail and save a lot of money—and the strategy worked great,” Buleza says.
Backcountry.com, No. 150 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide,
experienced similar success when coordinating e-mail campaigns with its catalog drops, vice president of marketing Dustin Robertson tells Internet Retailer. Robertson says Backcountry sees an increase in click-through rates and conversion if it times an e-mail campaign for just after it mails a catalog. “It’s probably that if the brand is fresh in people’s mind because they just saw it in the catalog, they are more responsive to opening the e-mail,” he says.
Lillian Vernon’s Kristen Montella, vice president of online, is speaking at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 4-7 in San Jose, in a session entitled Avoiding Disaster: Managing a Technology Implementation.
Back...
