B-to-B Insights : Catalog Curb Appeal

Tips to help make your catalog covers become eye-catching selling tools

When you’re selling your house, you plant flowers in the front yard, keep the lawn mowed and maybe touch up the trim with fresh paint. Your home’s curb appeal catches prospective buyers’ interest as they drive by. You have just a few seconds to convince them to step on the brake instead of hitting the gas. The same principle applies to your catalog covers.

Here’s how to plan your covers for traffic-stopping curb appeal:

First, make a list of your best-selling products. You’ll probably end up with more cover ideas than you have opportunities to mail. That’s good. Go ahead and begin development on all of them. Some ideas won’t work, but some may surprise you.

Front covers: Think of your front covers as a series of promotions highlighting your most important merchandise. Always put your best-selling and newly developed products that you believe will become best-sellers front and center. Your top customers and prospects will be receiving most, if not all, of your catalogs during the course of the year. This is your opportunity to show them the products they’re most likely to want. Design each front cover with a single product as the main focus for dramatic stopping power.

If you have best-selling products that are seasonal in nature, plan on beginning your schedule with those. For example, veterinary supply catalogs have months when flea and tick treatments are top sellers. First slot your best-selling seasonal products on covers during the appropriate seasons, then take the remaining best-sellers and pencil them in for your other covers.

Back covers: With your products for the front covers selected, it’s time to turn your attention to the back covers. Typically you’ll want to highlight two or three top-selling products, each from different categories. Remember that the back cover often gets seen first since mail is usually delivered with the address panel facing up.

Just because a product appears on the front cover for one drop doesn’t mean it can’t appear on the back cover for another. It’s fine to repeat products on the back cover, just make sure they aren’t on the front and back covers at the same time.

Once again, first look for any products that are seasonally appropriate. During the winter holidays, banking supply companies see an increase in sales of currency gift envelopes. The season lasts about three months, but they don’t want customer gift envelopes on the front cover of every catalog during that time. Since they’ve already placed the envelopes on the front cover for the optimal month, slotting gift envelopes on the back cover for the other drops during the selling season is a good idea.

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