Montgomery Ward catalog, 1955.

Every day, when I take the walk from my USPS mailbox to my recycle bin, I wonder about the role of a catalogs today. A recent catalog from Cabela’s, an outfitter offering over 200,000 outdoor products, offers an interesting new way to use print catalogs to support online sales.

Back in the day, catalogs used to be exhaustive tomes offering lots of details about each product variant. Think of the iconic, encyclopedic Sears Catalog - people got enough information in them to purchase Sears Catalog mail-order homes!

Now, I might page through a print catalog, but I’ll use the website to place an order. But, I’ll admit it, even as I don’t like getting and then recycling catalogs, I will visit a website and make a purchase after seeing something offline. I do want to limit the number of “unsolicited” catalogs I get, and so I recently joined CatalogChoice, a free service that lets me reduce the number of print catalogs I get in my mailbox. With CatalogChoice, I can enter in the customer # and address and ask to be unsubscribed from the print catalogs I want to stop coming.

Cabela's catalog cover

I just got a fascinating catalog from the outdoor outfitter Cabela’s. This one I won’t stop. Cabela’s has an immense selection of fishing, hunting, camping, and boating gear. They also have large retail outlets, I’ve heard that Cabela’s here in Dundee, Michigan is our #1 tourist attraction due to the sheer volume of visitors it draws to the state.

This catalog is unique and designed entirely to complement my habit of doing most of my research online. Instead of filling the catalog with words detailing product features, they’ve set the catalog up as a teaser to draw me to their website. The catalog consists of photographs of featured products, including action shots of the products being used. They do include some basic info, such as prices and a couple of feature highlights. Instead of giving me long product codes or SKUs that I would have to squint at and type into a search box to find the product on their website, the catalog provides recommended search terms for locating the product via in the site’s search. For instance, for the tent in the image below, the catalog urges you to “search: guide tent“. Plus, the print catalog shows user reviews, selected from the reviews on their website.

I think this is an exceptionally cool and smart print catalog, so I called up Cabela’s main office and spoke with David Draper, a Cabela’s representative. He said that Cabela’s releases around 90 catalogs a year, of which 89-or-so follow the more traditional catalog format. He said this “internet catalog” (what they call it) is a new effort for them, and that it is specifically targeted to online consumers. The inaugural issue was mailed within the last week. He couldn’t speak to our individual case, but the catalog could have been triggered by an online transaction at cabelas.com or by an opt-in from a transaction at our local retail store in Dundee.

I’m fascinated by this very effective use of a print catalog to draw me to their more comprehensive online e-commerce site. I’d be interested to know how successful this catalog is at driving traffic and sales at cabelas.com, and if Cabela’s has put in place some tracking to monitor use of the recommended keywords in their internal search and follow-on purchases after that, essentially to measure the return on this effort. I’ll also be watching to see if other vendors emulate this style of catalog.

Happy Memorial Day to those of us in the U.S. I hope this long weekend kicks off a great summer outdoors for you and your families.

Product page in the Cabela's print catalog - click through the image to see notes on Flickr

(Disclosure - Pure Visibility has no business relationship with Cabela’s, though I’m a retail customer)