How to Personalize

There is a form of personalization for catalogers, however. Most catalogers produce 10 to 15 different books per year. One cataloger, for instance, may produce some books featuring dress clothes, some with sports clothes, and some with children’s clothes. If a customer buys children’s clothes, she will get the children’s clothes catalogs. This sounds like personalization. But herein lies a problem: The catalog’s house file of previous buyers is often very small relative to the rented list of external names. Previous buyers are always the best responders. Why leave a previous buyer out of the sports clothing catalog mailing just because all she has bought before was children’s clothes? It does not make economic sense. So previous buyers will get all the catalogs. Where does database marketing figure in that? If you cannot personalize your communications, you cannot really do database marketing, so few catalogers spend any money on database marketing. That is, they didn’t until the advent of the Web.