The Wall Street Journal just published a story about large retailers seeing strong ROI from print catalogs. Our retail clients are seeing similar results from custom magazines.

The Journal notes that for men’s clothing retailer Bonobos “some 20% of the website’s first-time customers are placing their order after having received a catalog” and that customers that receive the catalog “spend 1.5 times as much as new shoppers who didn’t receive a catalog first.” The Journal reports that as a broad average catalogs that cost roughly $1 to produce return approximately $4 in new sales.

Why do custom pieces like catalogs and magazines work so well to drive sales to retailers’ websites? Here are some things we’ve seen:

Magazines are engaging

The average reader spends 40 minutes reading a magazine, according to research conducted by GfK MRI and The Wall Street Journal article states that UK retailer Boden finds “shoppers spend up to 15 to 20 minutes with a catalog…compared with an average of just eight seconds for a Boden email and about five minutes with the Boden iPad app.”

Magazines are trusted

Because most magazines are established publications with extensive track records in their niche, they are more trusted than television, radio, and the Web. A recent Nielsen study found that 47% of people trust ads in magazines, more than any other medium. Meanwhile, less than 35% trust search engine ads, online video ads, and social network ads (source: the MPA.)

Young people still love magazines

Many businesses look only to the Internet and social networks to target younger audiences but almost all young people still read magazines. In fact, 96% of adults under 25 read magazines and they read more magazines than older adults. In the past month, the average adult under 25 has read 8 magazines, considerably more than adults 35+ (source: the MPA.)

Magazines cause readers to take action

Data we’ve published before from the MPA shows over 36% of adults will search out a product they are interested in and saw in a magazine while only 26% will search out a product in an email ad, 24% will search out a product they saw in a Web ad and 17% will search out a product they saw on Twitter or Facebook.

If you’re a little bit intrigued by what a custom print piece could do for your business, take a look at this 55-second video from one of Wainscot’s custom magazine clients.

Then if you’d like to know more about custom publishing options for your business contact us here.