Catalogs: Low-Tech Tools for High-Tech Sales

'startupnation' June 2007

Sometimes, the key to promoting high-tech online sales is going low.
Strange as it may seem in a time when billions of dollars of commerce is taking place on the Web, old-fashioned ink-on-paper can be a very potent tool for goosing sales and cementing customer relationships.

“When Web sites started to show themselves, they replaced things like catalogs, stores, telephones, answering centers,” says Eddie Bakhash, president of AmericanPearl.com, a high-end New York-based jewelry company.

Now, Bakhash says, the world of online selling is “reaching maturity. Every site reaches a threshold where you’ve built a great site, you’re in the search engines, you’re spending money on cost-per-click advertising and your business cannot expand on the Internet anymore.”

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That’s the time to look back, and reconsider another time-tested promotional tool – catalogs.
Catalogs say you’re here to stay
Mario Barth saw a 12 percent increase in sales when he started circulating fliers for his online tattoo supplies business, The Tattoo Superstore.
“With all the Internet sites out there, if there is not some form of printed material supporting what you do, people think it’s not real,” says Barth, who runs four high-end tattoo studios and the online supply company from his Rochelle Park, N.J., headquarters.

A year after Barth sent a catalog to his customer base, online sales had increased by 1,045 percent. No joke.

“They felt very secure that the company is real,” says Barth, who started his site about three years before sending out the first catalog in 2004. “I send catalogs at least twice a year to my customers, and then I support it sometimes with special fliers as an insert in the catalog. People keep the catalog instead of throwing it out. When you make people interact again with your product, they start ordering again.”

When they work, they work
Not everyone shops by catalog – but those who do remember the business a lot longer, industry research has found.

Nearly 30 percent of footwear consumers said catalogs influenced their purchases more than newspaper ads, TV commercials or Internet ads, according to a study by Footwear News/NPD Group. That’s why Kassie Rempel complements her online women’s shoe boutique, SimplySoles, with seasonal catalogs.

“When I started SimplySoles, the business model was always to create dual marketing channels: the catalog and the Web site,” Rempel says. “They complement each other by reinforcing the brand. Business from the catalog is strong – 60 percent phone orders versus 40 percent Web orders. Our catalog keeps SimplySoles in the minds of our customers. We come to them, versus them just coming to us.”

AmericanPearl.com’s catalogs are half magazine, half selling tool ? or, as they’re called in publishing, “magalogs.” It’s a great way to “reinforce a message to an existing customer,” Bakhash says.

In fact, existing clients are the best audience for a catalog. Bakhash cautions fellow e-tailers to stay away from catalogs as a tool to find new buyers. They’re best, he says, for reminding customers you’re there and reawakening their desire to shop at your site.
AmericanPearl.com customers get catalogs before holidays, an anniversary or birthday. It’s a way to send a “meaningful message,” Bakhash says.
How to do it?

If you’re ready to add a catalog to your e-biz, start small, suggests jeweler Bakhash, who launched his online company in 1997 and issued his first catalog in 2001. Don’t commission a high-cost printer; buy desktop publishing software, a really good printer and do it yourself.
“With a little time and some off-the-shelf software, you can create beautiful-looking catalogs,” says Bakhash, whose company sends out 75,000 catalogs a year. “Once you measure your feedback, you can expand on that.”

Consider variable data printing – sending different catalogs to different customers based on their latest purchase (what accessories go with what they’ve already bought?). Not every marketing piece has to be the same.

Bakhash says the key to catalogs is using them as a tool for building ongoing relationships with your customers and keeping them strong – not just selling once, and leaving a pile of potential new sales on the table.

Lynne Meredith Schreiber is a freelance writer for StartupNation.