60 Ways to Increase Your Mail Order Catalog Sales
By DeAnna Spencer

This article is meant to inform. Please don't construe this as legal advice.

Perfection in a mail order catalog is like infinity...you can
continually approach it but never quite reach it. In the case of
many catalogs it is not necessary to achieve perfection
or even approach it very closely in order to make the catalog
vastly more profitable than it is at present. Relatively small
improvements can result in a more-than-proportionate enlargement
of that all-important figure on the bottom line of the financial
statement.

Making as many improvements as possible as quickly as possible is
probably the most profitable procedure. But even making each new
catalog a little better than the one that preceded it can
produce substantial increases in sales per catalog and in total
sales over a period of time.

Following are 60 suggestions that should help your catalog do a
better selling job for you if you are not already using these
ideas. Whether you use all of them in connection with your next
catalog or adopt a few at a time in the course of producing
several future catalogs, the ultimate result should be very
noticeable and very profitable.

BEFORE YOU CREATE YOUR CATALOG....

1. Look at your present catalog with extremely cold, critical and
unsympathetic eye. Pick out all the faults-large or small-that
you could find if you were no longer the owner of the catalog but
a nitpicking customer who has been disappointed in his or her
last purchase from you and is still sore about it. Such a review
could be very enlightening-even if it should prove slightly
embarrassing-and could make your new catalog much more
profitable.

2. Put your "letterman" on your team. Review all incoming
correspondence from customers and prospects during the last two
years for comments, suggestions or criticisms that may be helpful
in preparing your new catalog. Screen all future correspondence
of this nature as it arrives and place copies of the useful
letters in a special file to be reviewed before starting your
next catalog.