Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

Newness

2026-10-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

I watched some of the US-Spain Women's Soccer match Tuesday night.

So many players I didn't recognize. The ones I recognized largely won the Olympics a few years ago. The great class from 2015-2019, the players who struggled in the 2023 World Cup, they're gone. Times change, and if future players aren't identified and developed, future performance suffers.

Have you watched the Kansas City Chiefs play football this year? Patrick Mahomes is running the show, but look at his supporting cast ... it's a new generation of players, isn't it?

You know all about this dynamic, don't you?

If you don't find new customers, future performance suffers.

If you don't develop new items into winning items, future performance suffers.

In many ways, if you don't explore new marketing channels, future performance suffers. It's one of the blind spots of modern ecommerce professionals ... pursuit of marketplaces resulted in dead ends and missed opportunities elsewhere. Yes, some of you with commodity products are actually better-served selling on Amazon than on your own platform. Those of you who spent the past twenty years building viable "brands" have better opportunities to pursue.

Ecommerce is an endless exploration of "newness". If you are an analytically-focused professional, there's an entire career that can be built from the blueprint of newness + winners (winning items, winning customers).

A CEO Who's Customer Retention Heart Had Hardened

2026-10-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

Back in the days when somebody paid to put you on an airplane (i.e. pre-video-conference days), I was asked by a CEO to visit his company to address a comment I made in a project writeup.

The comment?

"Until 'brand x' realizes they only retain 33% of last year's buyer file and invests significantly in customer acquisition efforts, 'brand x" will continue to contract."

At this time I had worked with the brand for more than seven years.

I was asked to present my findings to several operational teams within the company. At the end of the day, the Executive Team gathered with the CEO. It was my job to explain my findings to the CEO.

The CEO did not like my message. He took umbrage with my comment that his brand would contract. He began to yell. His face reddened. He eventually slammed his fist on the table hard enough to cause tendon damage, telling me that I didn't understand business, that his team would crack the code for customer loyalty.

At this time, his annual rebuy rates had already declined by about five percentage points (i.e. from 45% to 40%) over a seven-year period of time. I decided to chime in. My comment would end our business relationship. Here's what I said.

"You've already had seven years as CEO to crack the loyalty code. Instead, your rebuy rates have contracted over your tenure. What makes you think you the next seven years will be different?"

With that, I lost a lot of $$$, because this client was very good to me.

Would you want an analytics consultant to tell you the truth?

Or do you want an analytics consultant to make you feel good?

This CEO wanted the latter.

The problem, by the way, was not fixed. Even after a new Management Team took over.

You do not solve customer retention problems. I have a client who does an amazing job of getting as close as you can to solving customer retention problems. They've figured out the fusion of merchandising strategy and marketing targeting solutions. You CAN make a difference. You CAN'T solve the problem.

Your ability to retain your customer base is largely constrained by the merchandise you sell. If you sell stuff that doesn't sell well in summer, why would you retain customers in summer? And if you cannot retain customers in summer, why would your retention rate be high?

The business I'm talking about here had a season when the majority of their sales happened ... the customer simply didn't need their products or services year-round. By default, their business was calibrated to NOT retain customers each year.

Most of your businesses are calibrated to NOT retain customers. That's business - you succeed for other reasons!!! You know this to be true if your average number of annual purchases per twelve-month buyer is under 2.0. Somewhere between 2.5 and 3.0 purchases per year is the spot where retention sings and loyalty becomes apparent.

No amount of fist-slamming fixes a retention problem. Only year-round appealing merchandise does that.

Your November / December Forecast

2026-10-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

Let's try something ... contact me (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and for a nominal fee I'll produce a forecast for three timeframes, based on how your customer file looks as of today. I mean, it is Forecast Season!

Timeframe #1 = November before the day before Thanksgiving.
Timeframe #2 = Cyber Window ... day before Thanksgiving to the Saturday after Cyber Monday.
Timeframe #3 = Sunday after Cyber Monday - December 31.

If you have a customer file problem, I'll be able to expose it for you quickly (project turnaround would be in just a few days), allowing you to change your marketing investments to help meet your business goals during November / December.

Contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and I'll turn this one around for you quickly at a cost that you can literally Venmo me the funds.

The Hated Holiday

2026-10-08T20:10:00.000-07:00

There's just nothing in ecommerce more rudimentary, nothing that shows your service provider doesn't truly understand business ... than the promotion of Cyber Monday.

Or worse, "BFCM" as the service provider industry calls it.

Yesterday I talked about "double dipping" ... the proven method of acquiring / converting customers in September / October so they are recent and active in November / December, thereby "double dipping" ... generating two orders in a short period of time.

What makes more sense to you?

Acquire a customer or activate a customer in Sep/Oct and then get another quick purchase in Nov/Dec?
Generate an order at 50% off and then the customer doesn't spend money on full priced merchandise the rest of the year while waiting for "BFCM" again? It's good business for service providers. It's not good business for you. Why give away all that gross margin to participate in a service provider holiday?

Have you ever asked yourself why Amazon might benefit from Prime Days in the first week of October? It's almost like they're trying to get customers to double-dip!

Double-Dip Season

2026-10-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

As you likely know, in most cases you WANT to acquire a new customer in September or October.

Why?

You get to double-dip.

When you acquire a customer on December 13, the customer is "done". The customer might purchase clearance products in January and might buy again in Spring (but probably won't buy again in Spring). From there, the customer largely goes dormant until the following November/December.

When you acquire a customer on October 13, the customer is "not done". When the customer is most likely to buy for a second time (the first ten weeks after a first purchase), you present the customer with November / December ... two months of amplified response. The customer quickly becomes a 2x buyer, and from there the customer is on the path to loyalty.

One of the easiest ways to build a loyal customer base is to acquire customers in Sep/Oct then send trigger-based email campaigns to customers through December to rapidly generate a second order. Many companies do this, it's highly effective, and it's highly profitable.

So go do it!!

Working With A Great Partner

2026-10-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

When I worked at Eddie Bauer, I was part of what was called the "Catalog Business Team" ... CBT. It was our job to execute the catalog and ecommerce marketing, merchandising, inventory, creative, and operational team plans. Not being Lemonheads, we took our mandate further. We acted like we owned the catalog/ecommerce division, for good reason of course, because if we messed up, we were fired. Best to be fired setting the tone rather than following marching orders.

I was responsible for catalog marketing and analytics. My inventory partner was the best. We made the company a ton of money by working together, partnering on what our business / sales plan would be long before anybody else paid attention. By doing that, we had a solid plan when the Executives chose to pay attention. They nibbled around the edges of the plan, but the plan was truly our plan.

The most profit the catalog/ecommerce channel ever generated happened on our watch.

We partnered on dictating the merchandise assortment we'd feature in catalog and online. Back then the catalog drove everything, today it would be quite a different story. Let's pretend that last year's October catalog had the following composition.

24 pages of mens existing merch.
24 pages of mens new merch.
36 pages of womens existing merch.
36 pages of womens new merch.
8 pages of home.
8 pages of womens tailored merch.
136 pages total.

I would determine how many pages we could profitably mail next year, based on last year's productivity. Let's say I could only author 120 pages. My partner would go back and optimize performance of each category above based on last year's productivity, yielding a plan that might look like this.

16 pages of mens existing merch.
20 pages of mens new merch.
40 pages of womens existing merch.
36 pages of womens new merch.
4 pages of home.
4 pages of womens tailored merch.
120 pages total.

From here, I'd calculate the expected productivity of the pages. Fewer pages means less sales but better productivity. I'd calculate "merchandise productivity" ... showing that my partner's optimization resulted in each page being 10% more productive. Sales would decrease, but each page was more profitable. This allowed me to circulate deeper, converting more customers.

Last Year: 3,000,000 catalogs at 136 pages, sales = $20,000,000. Demand per Thousand Pages Circulated = $49.02.
Next Year: 3,500,000 catalogs at 120 pages, sales = $22,320,000. Demand per Thousand Pages Circulated = $53.14.
Demand/Sales would be +12%, ad costs would be +3%, profit would increase by $700,000.

We replicated this for every catalog we'd mail, we'd adjust merchandise productivity and give direction to the nascent ecommerce team, our plan would fold into plans for the call center, the distribution center, for inventory buys, and it would give direction to our merchants and creative team.

There were two teams that generally argued with the plan.

The merchandising team.
The creative team.

The merchandising team did not like constraints ... constraints like "16 pages of mens existing merchandise". They wanted 32 pages. My partner and I would run the scenarios for everybody, showing how much sales/profit we'd give up adhering to their direction. To some extent this happens at every company, but disciplined companies push back when the merchants want "more".

The creative team did not like constraints. They wanted eight pages for "branding". No selling. We'd explain that was like flushing $80,000 of profit down the toilet. We'd ask the creative folks if they wanted to explain their ideas to the CEO. They didn't want to explain their ideas to the CEO.

There's nothing that destroys the profitability of an old-school catalog division like a creative director who wants to explore "branding".

But when you have a great business partner ... and the two of you work in lock-step ... you can achieve record profit.

Within a year I'd leave to work in the dot-com world (what ultimately became the 'retargeting' industry), watched my stock options go from 78 13/16 to 1, then accepted a job at Nordstrom, where I again had great partners (the merchant/creative person and the inventory person were both very good).

There are few things in business more enjoyable than working with great partners who have facts and work in lock-step with you to achieve great things ... and then great things happen.

Life of an Item

2026-10-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

In case you are wondering why I'm talking about items / merchandise more often, this is a process that happens every 3-5 years. Business doesn't go the way we want it to, we focus on merchandise for awhile (which often fixes the problem), then we get away from merch and focus on marketing channels until marketing channels don't work great (usually caused by merchandise problems) ... and we repeat the cycle.

We're always repeating the cycle.

Sometimes our merchandise assortment gets stale. It happens to every company. It's during the "stale periods" when we dig a bit deeper.

Let's pretend you measure how much items sell by year ... let's pretend you've analyzed the dynamic for items you've offered for at least four years. You see the following.

Intro Stub Year = $50,000 per item.
First Full Year = $75,000.
Second Full Year = $38,000.
Third Full Year = $19,000.
Fourth Full Year = $9,500.

The item essentially generates $191,000 over the stub year and first four years. You don't have unlimited warehousing space, so when an item dips below, say, $15,000, you discontinue the item and find something new. This means the life of the item is the stub year plus three full years.

Once you have a framework, you can identify the items in your assortment that are at the end of their life. You can communicate with your merchants that your customers need newness.

This is the point in the discussion where somebody will raise their hand and offer me advice:

"I work in marketing, and I shouldn't have to deal with merchandise performance, that's why we have merchants. I should be allowed to focus on marketing."

Oh my little grasshopper.

Have you ever noticed that when business is off by 5% the Finance Team and the Merchant Team start asking questions about marketing? I notice it. It happens. All the time. It's happened for the thirty-six years I've been in this business. Marketers are constantly being fired for merchandising sins.

Checks and balances are important. You do not want to be held accountable because your merchandising partners held on to old products too long. Measure the life of an item, and focus on communication when you notice that products are aging, potentially harming customer response.

Assortment Age

2026-10-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

If you want to understand if your customers are being impacted by your merchandise assortment, you can run my comp segment metrics (obviously) - you can run my Class Of Reporting (duh).

You can also measure what I call "Assortment Age".

Take every item a customer purchased in September, and for those items calculate the number of months that item has been available to be sold. If it were introduced fifteen months ago, the age of that item is 15 months. Perform this for every item you sell.

Compare September 2026 to September 2025, to September 2024. What is the average age of the assortment the customer purchased?

You might see something like this:

2026 = 13.2 Months.
2025 = 18.1 Month.
2024 = 13.6 Months.

The 2025 metric should set off all sorts of alarm bells.

There are a thousand reasons why an assortment ages or is immature. It's nearly impossible to balance the metric perfectly, teeter-totter style. Sometimes your assortment needs to be rebuilt and the assortment will be artificially "young".

If you have a month where results aren't ideal, go look at your merchandise assortment, calculate Assortment Age, and see what it tells you.

Email Messaging to Non-Fans

2026-10-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges of ecommerce-in-a-box is that you work so hard to piece together a credible vendor solution (i.e. Shopify) that you don't stop to ask yourself how the customer sees the experience.

Example?

Friday Pickleball.

I was on the ground floor, watching their funny videos years ago.

I've spoken with the guys at a pickleball tournament. If you've never been to a PPA Tournament in Mesa (or elsewhere), by all means, open up your wallet and enjoy. You might see the guys there.

My wife paid $ to be coached by Kyle Koszuta. I've forwarded his videos to my audience at Pickleball Mathlete. We've watched him battle the pros in early rounds on Pickleball.TV. We've enjoyed watching Rachel Rohrabacher battle the best in the business, using their paddles as their first signed pro.

We took their Pickleball Personality Test.

We watched those guys as they changed their lives, moving to Phoenix to grow their careers.

Last week, I needed a new paddle ... I bought the Friday Aura to help protect my arm from tennis elbow.

You'd likely say I'm a "fan".

Their ecommerce-in-a-box solution doesn't know that. They've sent me two ecommerce-related messages since.

Please Become An Affiliate Marketer For Them.
The Message Below.

I just bought a paddle, and NOW you're going to tell me you'll help me find the right paddle?

Mind you, this doesn't change anything because I'm a fan. I'm with them.

The message is for you, it's illustrative for your business. The vast majority of your customers are not fans. Nope. Those who aren't fans don't want a "customer relationship". They want you to fulfill a want/need they have at a point-in-time. Telling them you can solve a problem hours after they purchase thinking they've already solved the problem is counter-productive. It's especially counter-productive because you are a small/scrappy brand using Shopify / Klaviyo so you can compete/beat somebody like Macy's ... only to have ecommerce-in-a-box fail you.

Again, I love what the Friday Pickleball folks are doing overall - I'm a fan, so I'm not going anywhere. Most of your customers are not fans, so the rules for those customers are different. Your messaging should reflect that fact, it needs to be more "on point" if you will.

Rocktober

2026-09-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

Growing up, we had a Classic Rock station (it wasn't really "classic" yet, but you get the drift) that adored the month of October. They called October "Rocktober". Combine that with "Two for Tuesday" and you really had something ... the dulcet tones of the band Rainbow singing "Stone Cold" and "All Night Long".

I thought about stopping the post right there, but that wouldn't be fair to you, the loyal reader.

Every one of you has a marketing channel that is dying. Sort of like FM Radio is dying. My favorite station in the Pacific Northwest was KRXY ("Roxy") 94.5 from Shelton. You'd hear Rainbow's "Stone Cold" followed by "Cherish" by Madonna followed by "Loser" by Beck and then they'd wrap it up with something from Arianna Grande. Just random Rock/Pop nonsense.

There was nothing like it.

And then?

Spotify playlists.

On June 30, KRXY didn't sell to some soulless entity and become part of the "iHeart Radio Family". They just shut down. Over. Fin. Bankrupt. Their scraps were ultimately acquired by another local station.

Every one of you has a marketing channel that is dying. For some of you, you don't have the metrics to realize that the marketing channel is dying. You keep paying Facebook and they keep sending you customers eight years older than your average customer and you think things are fine. They're not fine. One of the signs of a dying marketing channel is that the customers delivered by the marketing channel are disproportionately older than the age of customers from other marketing channels. Catalogers know this all too well ... they ran their businesses into the ground trusting co-op marketing channels who delivered 74 year old customers instead of the 47 year old customers they needed.

Identify the average age of all customers acquired in the past year by marketing channel. Yeah yeah, I know, marketing attribution double-counting blah blah blah. Do the work anyway. If the nascent new customer from ChatGPT is 33 years old, the Google Search customer is 43 years old, and the paid social customer from Facebook is 58 years old, you have a pretty good idea which marketing channel is going to become KRXY.

Warning Sign: Prices Up, Customers Correspondingly Down

2026-09-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

When you increase prices (typically by discontinuing a product line and introducing a new/comparable line at a higher price), there are several things that can happen.

Nothing. This is the hope. You essentially increase prices and customers don't care. It's the kind of thing Apple gets away with.
Fewer Items per Order. This is the most common outcome. Prices increase from $20 to $25, customers in-kind decrease items per order from 2.5 to 2.0. Nothing has been accomplished with the notable exception of fewer items going through your distribution center.
Fewer Orders per Buyer: Happens less frequently than (2) above but it still happens. Some of your existing customers just say "no". AOV hawks will quickly point out that there's nothing wrong with AOV, and they're right, AOV often increases in these circumstances. And yet? Business is just "off" a few percentage points ... because customers are not buying as often.
Lower Repurchase Rate: Sort of a byproduct of Fewer Orders per Buyer, but more significant because some customers just say "no mas" and go find something cheaper on Amazon. Once you start trading in the dark arts of lower repurchase rates, all sorts of lousy outcomes transpire. Your buyer file decreases, you have to "make budget" so you acquire more new customers at ever-more-expensive rates to make up the difference harming the p&l in the process. This is a common scenario.
Fewer New/Reactivated Buyers: The counterpart to (4) above. (4) is a measure of what your existing customers think, (5) is a measure of what "the market" thinks about your pricing. It is common to see a disconnect here ... stable repurchase rates among existing buyers but a 20% drop in new/reactivated buyers. If your annual rebuy rate is 30%, the market dictates what you do. If your annual rebuy rate is 70%, you dictate what you do.

(4) and (5) result in declining customer counts. Review your prices post-COVID and correlate average price per item purchased with rebuy rates and with new/reactivated buyers.

Does the analysis reflect any warning signs?

Signaling The Warning Signs

2026-09-28T20:10:00.000-07:00

Here's lawyer-esque boilerplate commentary from Gap's 10K report for 2025, page 38.

A credit rating of BB+ isn't great.

For you and I, interest rates are going up.

And if you really want to terrify yourself, listen to this podcast (click here) and learn what happens when the AI bubble pops. Assuming the hosts are correct, which is an assumption.

You can slide on down to page 45 in the 10K document. Sales up two percent. Store sales +1%, Ecommerce sales +4%. A +2 comp in an inflationary environment isn't really a +2 comp, as you all know. Gross margin was down from 41.3% to 40.8%. Inventory was +7% (oh oh).

If this phrase for fixing the business doesn't signal a warning sign, I don't know what does. Again, from page 45.

"... optimizing our platform to drive scale by advancing capabilities that amplify and enable our brands."

3% of stores have been closed over the past two years.

Free cash flow is down nearly 20% vs. a year prior.

Now, you're probably saying to yourself, "Kevin, that's the 2025 annual report. They're halfway or more into 2026". You are correct.

Q2 2026:

Net Sales -2%.

Gross Profit +$390 million due to a recovery of $417 million in tariffs, otherwise down $27 million.

You're probably paying attention to your metrics as well. Get your business as healthy as you can. It's possible you'll experience chaos after the election, followed by the unwinding of the AI bubble over the next two years. Or not. I'd want to be prepared.

Reassessing

2026-09-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

There's been all sorts of calamities, some caused by external issues, some self-inflicted.

I recall 1995, 1998, years where the companies I was with caused their own problems.

2001 - a hybrid of the end of the dotcom era and self-inflicted damage.

2007 - when you could feel that customers spent all their "free" money from their homes, there wasn't anything left to spend (as we'd soon find out).

2012 - the collapse of the omnichannel movement begins (accelerating into 2016/2017).

2021 (Fall) - the popping of the COVID bump.

The data I'm seeing these days is mixed, with some able to thrive, others battling external issues and internal mistakes.

When business signals are mixed, reassess your marketing spend, reassess your new item development plan. Run your Class Of Report (I'll do it for you if you don't have the resources to do it), and make sure you aren't -20% on demand from new items this year (which will cost you money on existing items next year) or -20% on existing items this year (meaning you discontinued stuff you shouldn't have).

Can You Believe It? It's Time, Again

2026-09-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

Four months go by in the snap of a finger!

It's time for yet another run of the MineThatData Elite Program. Cost is $1,800 for first-time participants, $1,000 for those who previously participated. You receive the standard suite of metrics I run (rolling twelve-month analysis, comp segment, comp new/reactivated buyers, repurchase behavior, new/reactivated buyer trends, next twelve-month forecast). Very little cost, plenty of insights into where your business is headed.

Contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and let's get started.

Data Due by 10/15/2026.
Payment Due by 10/15/2026.
Analysis Delivered by 10/31/2026.

Ways To Grow

2026-09-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

Let's assume you aren't a retail brand looking to add stores. Your growth options are actually quite limited.

You can find new customers. This is necessary, and it is not generally prioritized.

You can get existing customers to spend more. This is hard, it is almost always prioritized, and is often a waste of resources.

You can add product lines and/or create new brands. Non-competing product lines are one of the best ways to grow. If you sell Women's Apparel and you move into Kids, guess what? You'll sell more merchandise. If you sell Women's Apparel and you move into Widgets? That's a lot harder.

You can move into other channels. It's the reason many of you sell on Amazon. They do the hard work, they take a chunk of your profit in kind.

As it becomes harder to find new customers, it becomes necessary to explore new product lines and/or new brands.

What Does The Plan Look Like When Proper Organic Percentages Are Applied?

2026-09-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

If I have to hear one more professional lament the fact that Orvis doesn't mail catalogs anymore but Amazon does ... then suggesting that "Amazon is smarter" ... my goodness.

None of that matters. The only thing that matters is your customers, your marketing efforts, and the incremental effectiveness of your marketing efforts. That's it.

Here's what proper application of the "Organic Percentage" looks like. Below is a typical circulation plan (simplified by deciles instead of segments for illustrative purposes) via matchback analytics. Looks good on the surface (only look at the top portion of the table for now).

Every segment is profitable - you could absorb a 10% increase in ad costs and still be profitable. It's all good! Catalogs work.

Except they don't work for most customers.

You're one of the smart ones ... you execute mail/holdout tests. For you, 75% of the demand will happen anyway, 25% is "caused" by catalog marketing. Which leaves you with the bottom half of the table.

Look at that. There are ten deciles/segments there. How many are profitable? One (1). One!! Just the most loyal customers. Every other segment represents a marketing abomination.

In case you are wondering, this is where the arguments begin.

There is the group of professionals who simply do not believe the results. They are true believers in the craft. You cannot convince this audience of anything, even though 80% of the catalog pages circulated 20 years ago no longer exist (because they were terribly ineffective). You have to let these people marinate in their delusion.

There is a group of professionals who have to test 50 times ... they believe that the test results "are not representative". These people are stalling. They know the change that these results will lead to, and they don't want to deal with change. So they delay the inevitable.

There are a small group of professionals who believe the results, but realize their organization is unwilling to change. This audience largely left catalog marketing in the past twenty years, and are now thriving in ecommerce.

There are a small group of professionals who work in paper / printing / agencies. They CANNOT believe these results, because as I was told by a paper rep ... "it will take food off my dinner table, and I cannot allow that to happen". They lie to benefit their craft. They are not fundamentally different than politicians who lie to protect their congressional seat.

There are a small group of professionals who work at agencies AND they believe in the results and they try to do what is best for their clients. If the agency you work with is willing to execute mail/holdout tests and evaluate results via the bottom half of the table (above), hold on to that agency like your life depends upon it.

Then there are the companies who change. Like Nordstrom did back in 2005 when I worked there (they kept mailing branding-centric catalogs throughout, but the classic list-based catalog business model was discountinued). Like Orvis. Like several of my clients. Why are they changing? Because they run a p&l that looks like this.

These companies make a choice. They take the 17% demand hit, but save $360,000 in ad cost and increase profit by $213,000 (in this example). With the ad cost savings, they typically reinvest in digital marketing channels ... or they just become a smaller brand that is more profitable. Either way, they outperform those who don't evaluate their businesses in this manner.

Did you see what happened in the bottom half of the table, when you evaluate your circulation plan via mail/holdout tests?

Only the most loyal customers are profitable.

This is why you'll see brands with the GDP of Australia be able to mail catalogs ... they have hyper-loyal customers that can afford to be mailed even if little of the demand generated by the catalog is actually incremental.

This is why I argue that catalog marketing will still be a craft that can be applied to loyal customers or hyper-productive customers. The math will continue to work for a period of time.

But for everybody else?

It's over.
It's been over for a long time.
There's no reason to badger Orvis because they made what is in reality an easy, fact-based, profitable decision.

It's Forecast Season!

2026-09-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

Somebody at your company sounded the alarm bells about November/December.

Is that person right? Are you going to be below plan/budget? Or is the professional paranoid?

It helps to have facts, doesn't it?

As I generally do each year, I'll accept five years of data through September 30. With that data, I'll tell you what your projections for November/December look like. It's Forecast Season!

Contact me right now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and I'll project November/December for you at a low cost.

Content Creation

2026-09-17T20:10:00.000-07:00

Here's the link.

I realize many of you are stymied by creating content for your customers. Some of you would say the video above is pointless, useless, and may have nominal ROI if any. Think of this as a triangle, with being "stymied" on one point, "pointless" on another, and doing something on the third point of the triangle.

How Will You Give New Items Exposure?

2026-09-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

It's hard for the customer to know you have new merchandise unless you tell them you have new merchandise. You do that through print (for some of you), you do that through email marketing, you do that through your home page, you do that via social media.

Now think a bit about the evolution of search. Your search-centric customers already skew to existing items ... just perform the analysis yourself, it's easy to do and it is revealing as heck. Algorithms push customers to items that algorithms know about.

AI likes/needs to be "trained". How do you train an algorithm on an item that you won't offer yet for two more months?

Email marketing is going to become your most important new merchandise advertising platform. It will be one of the few places you have control over the message. Start your experiments today, learn as much as you can, and be ready for the change that is coming.

The Organic Percentage Over Time

2026-09-15T20:10:00.000-07:00

When I left Lands' End in 1995, one of the challenges the analytically-focused person faced was the fact that some in Management did not believe that if you didn't mail a catalog 30% of the demand would still happen (from surrounding catalogs). This "fact" (measured via mail/holdout tests) meant that what was marginally profitable was, in fact, unprofitable. Nobody wants to be tied to something that is unprofitable. Consequently, facts were not accepted.

At the time I thought "these people just aren't smart enough to understand simple math". I was wrong. People are smart enough to understand facts, be it in marketing or politics. People choose to ignore facts for perfectly good reasons.

The organic percentage, at 30% in 1996, would become larger, creating ever-bigger problems.

By decade, the organic percentage grew.

1996: 30%.
2006: 50%.
2016: 65%.
2026: 80%.

In 2026, the only customers that can be profitably mailed are good or great customers. That's it.

And I get it ... some of you are reading this and you go back to your matchback analytics and you say "I'm good". You run a p&l on each segment and you believe you are mailing 36 month customers profitably. If you believe this, execute the following experiment.

Assume your organic percentage isn't 80%, assume it is just 50%. Pretend like it is 2006.
Run a p&l for each segment assuming your organic percentage is an old-school 50%.
What does the analysis tell you?

It tells you an inconvenient truth.

If you do what the analysis says, your company will be more profitable. Much more profitable.
If you do what the analysis says, you will cost your company top-line sales/revenue/demand, and you have forces within your company who will never let you do that.

This is why so many catalog brands ultimately went bankrupt. They couldn't let the top-line contract, so they just kept doing what they were doing until unprofitable became "too unprofitable" while customer response also contracted.

When the AI bubble pops (and it most assuredly will pop), new ecommerce models fueled by what AI is supposed to become will emerge. Print will be forced to be leveraged only by brands with the GDP of Bolivia or will be a tactic to leverage with best customers with high iROAS. It will not be a channel to center an entire business around (and honestly, it hasn't been for 20 years). Also - the same forces that came for catalog marketing will come for old-school ecommerce in a few years. It's how capitalism works.

An Interesting Evaluation Of Marketing Effectiveness

2026-09-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

A link was offered to download a "white paper" demonstrating that print has fabulous ROI.

The "good" from the PostPilot report?

S-Tier Analysis: Conducted via mail/holdout groups. Yeah, they went there. Kudos!
They Didn't Lie: Their results "make sense". They aligned with reality.

The "not so good" that made me #sigh?

Results derived from highly responsive customers.

You can cover a whole bunch of sins by executing marketing against the most responsive customers. Just ask the loyalty industry for verification. Here is an example of the kind of direction they're leading you in.

There is nothing nefarious happening here - the analysis is measured properly, the organic percentage is common/reasonable, and iROAS (incremental demand / ad spend) is incremental.

Is there a flaw in the analysis?

No.

Is the analysis misleading?

Yes.

Why?

The analysis was executed against highly responsive customers ... ones about to buy or ones who just purchased. In either case, the customer is not representative of the customer base. EVERY marketing effort "is likely" to work when measured against highly responsive customers. Including print. Especially print!

The logic falls apart when you take the same conditions and apply them to, say, a customer who has not purchased in 18 months.

Everything is the same here - same incremental lift, same ad cost, same organic percentage. However, the customer is simply not responsive. As a consequence, the marketing channel is not effective, with a horrifying iROAS and a loss.

That's how you make something appear to be effective - execute it against responsive customers.

But when you try to extend the audience? Not so good.

Email and Social are the ways you speak with non-responsive audiences. Ad costs are so minimal that the numbers work.

You Get This Newsletter Every Saturday, Right?

2026-09-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

If you want to see what a mix of professionalism, free information, and personal expression looks like, get on this email subscription (I've been here for more than a decade, long enough to see his kids grow up and move into college and begin careers).

Saturday's email was about the resurgence of brand marketing ... which is interesting because on many recent video conferences there have been robust discussions about the death of catalog marketing and the importance of email marketing as one of the few ways to have an actual "relationship" with a customer.

25 Years

2026-09-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

It's almost unfathomable that a full generation has passed since 9/11. Twenty-five years. More than a quarter of the people who experienced that day are no longer with us, including 3 out of 8 of the adults who experienced that day.

Pressure causes people to behave in interesting ways. On 9/11, I recall a peer VP sobbing. An Executive looked at me and said "Why is she so sensitive?". He then locked myself and my Marketing Director in a conference room from 2:30pm - 7:00pm because, as he said, "we'll get an opportunity to fix the business and nobody will be here to bother us". I sent my employees home, then failed to fix the business during the 4.5 hour session. Obviously, the Leader was responding to pressure in a manner inconsistent with logic. It's easy to feel empathy for the Leader today. I felt something different that afternoon.

A woman I've played pickleball with described what it was like to try to get out of the city on 9/11. Her ordeal was obviously more harrowing than a 4.5 hour session in a stale conference room.

It's like the events of that day sent us down a different reality path ... not unlike the one in Back to the Future where our heroes end up in a timeline controlled by Biff Tannen.

No matter what happens, we move forward. We are resilient.

How Do You Know When A Marketing Channel Is Dying?

2026-09-09T20:10:00.000-07:00

Last month I was asked this question. What a good question!

In 1999 at Eddie Bauer, I measured "phone" customers ... those who bought by calling our contact center. About 10% of those customers placed an ecommerce order the next time they purchased. Meanwhile, almost no ecommerce customers placed an order using the phone on a next order.

Run that relationship out a few years and it became obvious that the marketing channel known as catalog marketing was doomed.
If you didn't look at the data in this fashion (nobody does), it becomes really difficult to see that a marketing channel is dying. By purposely not running the analysis in this way, one can believe forever that the marketing channel is not dying when it is most certainly not dying.

The relationship I described (identified in 1999) ran like a runaway truck from 2003 - 2013.

About 30% of phone customers placed their next order online.
Virtually no online customers placed their next order via the phone.

By the time we got to 2013, catalog marketing as a discipline was done. No, not to the NEMOA audience obviously, but to any rational observer it was done. By 2013 the rate of phone customers shifting online in their next order was back in the 10% - 15% range. In other words, all the customers who were going to convert to online buying had already converted to online buying. The only customers left were all 60+ years old (in 2013 - imagine their age today).

This is how marketing channels die. It happened to Spiegel / JCP / Sears / Wards. It happened to specialty catalogs. It's going to happen to ecommerce brands over the next decade once the AI bubble pops and newer AI-centric business models emerge from the rubble.

There is going to be "something". You might implement "something" on your old-school website that causes customers to change their behavior. You might push your customers to an AI-infused marketplace (don't do that for Heaven's sake). You might generate traffic on your site from an AI-infused marketplace and notice that you don't have the same traffic from Google. Regardless, "it" is going to happen.

You will measure the dynamic.
If 20% of customers who bought from the old-school channel last year purchase via the new channel this year ... but very few of the new channel customers go back to the old-school channel, you know that a marketing channel is dying.

How many of you measure marketing channels in this manner, show of hands?

Business Isn't Easy

2026-09-08T20:10:00.000-07:00

I reviewed all clients who were charter members of my Elite Program back in 2015 ($1,000 per run for existing clients, 3x per year, voluntary performance).

A third of charter members are no longer in business.

All of the brands now out of business were catalog brands.

Other catalog brands were distressed, gobbled up by catalog holding companies.

If you go back to 2007 when I started my consulting work, about 2/3rd of the catalog brands I worked with in my first decade of consulting are gone.

Gone!

No amount of paper / printing / agency discourse changes facts. If you're still here? You did something right!

After the AI bubble pops, there will be new business models. New business models will grow at the expense of existing ecommerce brands. The cycle will repeat. It's unavoidable, it's how capitalism works.

It's also very rewarding to fight against forces working against you ... to persevere, to thrive, to overcome challenges with great merchandise!