E-mails Plus Catalogs Equals Boost for Miles Kimball

Over the past few years, multititle cataloger Miles Kimball has made it a priority to coordinate its online marketing efforts with its catalog mailings. E-mail campaigns that are part of this strategy have boosted response and revenue by up to 20% while enabling the company to regularly contact “those who because of segmentation or other reasons don’t receive the print catalog,” says Internet marketing manager Rob Chapman.

Each of Miles Kimball’s six brands—As We Change, Easy Comforts, Exposures, the Home Marketplace, and Walter Drake as well as the titular brand—mails 12 catalogs drops a year. “In some cases,” Chapman says, “it’s a new cover but not new guts. But though it’s more of a remail we do treat it like a separate catalog drop.”

One element of the company’s multichannel strategy is to send recipients of the As We Change, Easy Comforts, and Exposures catalogs an e-mail a day or two prior to when the print books are expected to land in mailboxes. The e-mail is primarily a heads-up to pique customers’ interest and spur them to set aside the catalog when it arrives rather than put it on the bottom of the to-do pile or, worse, immediately recycle it.

“In the creative of the e-mail we will show the catalog cover to make the connection to the catalog in the home,” says Chapman.

The choice of those three brands as the first to send catalog-preview e-mails was accidental, Chapman adds; it just happens that those were the titles he had responsibility for when he decided to try the tactic. The company is testing the e-mails on its other three brands, however.

So far, the e-mail previews provide a significant lift in response for As We Change, which targets perimenopausal and more-mature women, and Easy Comforts, which sells health and wellness products for older customers. “It doesn’t work quite as well for Exposures,” Chapman admits. Exposures, which sells photo albums and frames, targets a younger, more upscale audience and sells products with an appreciably higher price point.

But Exposures has had success using e-mails with links to digital versions of its current print catalog to reactivate nonrecent buyers. For instance, Chapman incorporated Exposures’ May sale catalog, the print version of which mailed to recent buyers and prospects, into what he describes as a “very heavily segmented, 10-series e-mail campaign.” Recent buyers received a basic e-mail linking to the digital version of the sale catalog; lapsed and inactive buyers received versions that offered additional discounts and/or free shipping. Several of the e-mails to the older customers, Chapman says, generated response rates as high as those sent to the recent buyers.

Subscribers to all six of Miles Kimball’s catalog brands receive monthly e-mails linking to the digital version of the current catalog edition. These e-mails are among the company’s most effective. “It differs a little bit among brands,” Chapman says, “but we see upwards of a 15%-20% increase in activity for the e-mails, and some cases in revenue as well.” The e-mails typically include a link to a landing page of merchandise new to that edition of the catalog. 

Even customers who also receive the print catalog have “high click rates” in response to these e-mails, Chapman says. As a result, the company is doing hold-out testing to see if it can stop mailing print catalogs to some of these customers. 

The company is so pleased with the response to the e-mails that it has started including the digital catalog versions on the Facebook pages of its As We Change and Exposures brands. For Exposures, within the first five weeks of incorporating the digital catalogs on Facebook, the social network was responsible for nearly 5% of that channel’s activity.