Cutting Catalog Costs

                                                                                         

Let’s say your company has a history of using catalog printing to send out a monthly, or perhaps yearly catalog. The problem comes along when business is down during one period or another and you don’t want to spend the same money you had before to get those catalogs out there.

Unfortunately you’re hands are somewhat tied now. If you suddenly don’t send a catalog one month people might start to feel as if your company is in trouble and lose interest in doing business with you. If you drastically change formats into a slim catalog to save on costs people might think you can’t afford the bigger format and once again lose interest in you.

The question then becomes how do you save money on your catalogs without signaling that you’re in trouble?

There are a variety of smaller changes you can make to help reduce costs without causing any kind of uproar with your customers. While a big reduction in size to what is referred to as a slim jim catalog might upset people, that doesn’t mean you can’t do a smaller size reduction, such as reducing the height and width by half an inch.

Now, this might not seem like much, but the reduction in paper costs can help curb some of the costs. The same goes for reducing the amount of pages your catalog has.

A page number reduction comes with its own pitfalls to watch out for.

What you don’t want to do is cram your pages so full of products people get the impression that you can’t afford to have a catalog long enough to properly display them. If you reduce the number of pages you have to accept that you also need to reduce the number of products you can effectively advertise in that catalog.

To work a catalog needs to be designed around selling your products, and if you attempt to put too many products in you’ll fail at successfully marketing any of them. Figure out what products have the best chance of selling and give them the prominence they deserve while cutting out whatever has a bad track record with the customers. It isn’t easy to make yourself remove a product from your catalogs, but sometimes you simply have to in order to not bring all of your other products down.

Finally, look at your mailing costs and where you might be able to cut back. You don’t want to cut back on the number of catalogs you send out if at all possible. This might amount to doing something like co-mailings to saves costs, or talking to your local post office or UPS store about other kinds of savings.

If you take all of these things combined you can help to reduce the costs of your catalogs without abruptly changing the format or greatly reducing the number of people you’ve been sending them out to.

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