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IF EVER THERE WAS A MULTICHANnel merchant, it's the HoneyBaked Ham Co.

The venerable firm sells home-style food through catalogs and over 300 retail outlets, relying on e-mail to communicate with customers. But it uses the medium differently in each channel.

Last December, for example, the Detroit-based company launched The Roundtable, an e-mail newsletter featuring holiday entertaining tips. Two issues have been sent to 70,000 “retail-focused customers” who live within a seven-mile radius of one of HoneyBaked's stores.

Why focus on retail when the firm also has a big catalog business?

Because “we're worried about there not being a call to action for catalog customers,” said director of enterprise direct marketing Tim Kiss, speaking at the 2005 Annual Catalog Conference in Orlando, FL in May.

In fact, that's one reason the company pulled the plug on its previous newsletter. In 2000, it started an e-zine solely for its catalog customers, but it was “copy heavy and didn't have enough calls to action,” Kiss said. “We didn't know what we were doing.”

Since then, HoneyBaked has improved sales by using e-mail to reinforce its catalog mailings.

“The e-mail follows in a couple of days,” Kiss said. “Our catalog gets a customer interested, our e-mail closes the deal.”

Despite their differences, the various channels and media support each other, he continued.

When a newspaper ad coincides with a direct mail campaign, “the two together increase sales,” he said.

How does he get the channels to work together? “When you work on both the retail and catalog sides it's not hard to talk the other side into it,” he laughed.

HoneyBaked, which now has around 180,000 names on its e-mail list, is getting ever more skilled at marketing to them.

For example, it's now adept at personalization. “We actually say, ‘Send your sister Betty Sue the same ham you sent last year,’” Kiss said. “And we try to have creative focused on the occasion — for example, we might have a Christmas tree in the background.”

The firm also has delved into list segmentation. HoneyBaked goes beyond the classic direct marketing formula of recency, frequency and monetary value.

“If we're doing a clearance sale, we pull out our highest-end customers,” he said.

Kiss concluded: “The greatest success we've had is when we've talked to customers as a family.”