Riding the Paper Tiger

Gauge Your ROI
Online acquisition tools aren’t limited to e-mail, however. The popularity of search also continues to gain. But segmenting customers acquired purely online is vital to print mailing plans.

“The differential behavior has to provide the ROI to justify the mailing of the catalog,” Lenser says. “If you have customers who frequently place orders on the Internet — particularly if they originated on the Internet — segment these people by origination and degree of Internet shopping. Then see if you were to hold out control and test panels, whether the catalog would be fully justified to mail.”