How a catalog pulls its weight without taking a single order
Backcountry.com’s catalog, which mailed for the first time last fall, isn’t transactional, but it’s become a big part of getting customers to buy, says vice president of business development John Bresee. “A channel is only that which can take an order, and for us that’s the Internet and the phone,” he says.
Where the catalog pulls its weight is in driving customers to those channels and reminding them about the online store at critical times during the buying cycle, which, for the retailer of gear for outdoor adventures, is highly seasonal.
“If someone unsubscribes from our list, we can’t e-mail them. “They are out of the game for us unless we send them a catalog so the catalog is the only way to reach them,” Bresee says.
The Heber City, UT-based retailer just mailed the third edition of its catalog, largely a re-covered version of the summer catalog that mailed six weeks earlier. Admittedly a newbie in the catalog business, Backcountry has already had some key learnings about it over the past several months. One is about the challenge of national catalog distribution tied to seasons when seasons peak at different times in different parts of the country. “In Georgia, for example, they are buying their camping gear six weeks earlier than in Maine," he says.
Another lesson was in the judicious use of catalog real estate. Going forward, the catalog content will more closely reflect Backcountry’s sales history in terms of which products and categories are featured and how much space they get, Bresee says. “We have people fighting to get different products into the catalog, for example, saying we need four pages of climbing gear. But while we all love climbing gear here, only a small segment of our customer base buys it,” Bresee says.
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