How Print Can Still Impact Online Consumer Behavior

We often discuss the demise of print in tandem with the rise of digital media. But for retailers, printed materials, like catalogs, for instance, can still have a significant impact on the behavior of online shoppers.

We recently chatted with Coy Clement of clementDirect, a consulting firm specializing in catalog/multichannel direct marketing strategy, whose clients include Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and J. Crew, among others. Here’s a clip from the full interview on eMarketer Total Access, where Mr. Clement sheds some insights on catalogs as a marketing tool and how retailers should follow customers’ channel shopping preferences:

eMarketer: Do people who arrive at a retailer’s Website from its catalog exhibit different shopping behavior from those who arrive via a search engine?

Mr. Clement: People who receive the catalog tend to use the Website differently from people who haven’t received a catalog. I’ve seen cases where people who’ve received the catalog buy the featured items. They know what they’re looking for, and they use the catalog as a guide to what the company is selling. People who show up through organic search or a corporate high-traffic site have much more difficulty navigating the Website because they really don’t know what the key items are.

Many retailers split their clickstreams into two parts to look at the online buyers who received a catalog and those who didn’t. You frequently find that the people who didn’t receive the catalog are buying strange things, products that the brand may not even consider to be its key statement items. That’s very worrisome. If retailers see that lots of times they’ll realize that the people they’re bringing in don’t understand the key proposition of the Website. If they were, they’d be buying the important items.

eMarketer: Have retailers changed their catalog design based on how people shop on their Websites?

Mr. Clement: I’ve helped retailers design three or four different methods of accessing the Website, for instance shopping by intended gift recipient, by occasion, by a category or by price point. If you offer people on the Website the ability to do any of those four things, what you figure out is which ones are most used.

In one company I was working with, we found that the price point shopping tool was much more heavily used than any other approaches. It caused us to add some items into the catalog, some blocks of copy, that did price point-oriented comparisons. “If you’re looking to spend under $25, here’s a list of items with their page numbers that you could consider. If you’re looking to shop between $30 and $50, then here are those things.”

Another thing I’ve done with retailers is look at search terms and learn about the customers’ terminology. Is she looking for blouses or tops? Merchants might be talking terms like tops, but maybe the customer isn’t ever using that word for search. Search terms can give you an insight into the actual way customers are thinking about your products.

eMarketer: How do retailers measure the impact of their catalogs on online sales? Do they measure, for instance, the amount of online sales derived from customers who arrived from their catalog?

Mr. Clement: The more sophisticated marketers are doing more than that. For example, e-mails do better for people who also receive catalogs than for people who receive e-mails only. Another way to measure the incremental sales impact is if you take 1,000 people and some of them get catalogs and some of them don’t. You can actually measure their purchasing over a period of time.

What is harder to measure, but still important, is the mindshare people have. This is particularly important for companies in fairly competitive fields. Let’s say you’re in a technology business and you look at people who don’t receive a catalog and people who do, and you do blind research, not telling them who the company is. You say, “Why don’t you tell me what you think of Dell or HP?” Researchers have found over the years that customers who receive catalogs tend to have a higher brand awareness and mindshare than people who don’t. It’s partly a measurement of actual purchasing but for some companies that brand share, in their heads, is also an important attribute.

eMarketer: What trends will affect how customers use a catalog to cross-channel shop?

Mr. Clement: The first trend I see is retailers breaking away from this idea of determining what the customers ought to do. The biggest decision retailers need to make is whether they are trying to evolve their channel preference to match their customers’ needs. Is the customer asking to get more Web or get more print, or are retailers trying to force it to happen? Forcing customer behavior is much more difficult than following customer behavior.

Retailers are becoming more sensitive to the fact that just because they want 20% more business on the Web doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what customers want. Some of this is happening naturally because I work with retailers who sell to 20-something-year-olds. For those people, the online experience and social media experience already is the predominant way of communicating with them. But when you’re talking to 40- and 50-year-olds who have different media patterns, trying to make them behave as though they’re 25 is a losing proposition. I think that even in the older groups, you’re seeing some natural movement. As more people shop online and spend more time online, they are becoming more open to that way of doing things. So you’re seeing retailers moving dollars out of print into online. But I think a few years ago there was a great desire to basically say, “Let’s just eliminate the catalog.”

eMarketer: Are millennial shoppers abandoning catalogs?

Mr. Clement: Of course. I do projects with a lot of different retailers. In looking at companies that are selling to 25- to 35-year-olds, print would definitely be a smaller component of their spending than it would be for older customers. Social media, electronic communication—those things would be a higher proportion of what they do.

But within those cohorts, you still have product differences. If you’re selling electronics for instance, anybody who’s a sophisticated electronics shopper knows that by the time you get the catalog, it’s old news. So if you send out catalogs, there’s got to be a purpose other than announcing new products in the electronics field. For a given audience or product category, print meets the customers’ needs differently.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

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