{"id":736,"date":"2025-05-11T12:13:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-11T12:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greenerprinter.com\/blog\/?p=736"},"modified":"2026-09-09T12:13:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T12:13:53","slug":"print-catalogs-boost-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenerprinter.com\/blog\/print-catalogs-boost-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"How Print Catalogs Boost Sales (And How to Print Green)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How Can Print Catalogs Boost Your Sales?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Catalogs might seem like a relic next to email and social ads, but a well-known Harvard Business Review field study on a $60M e-commerce retailer found the opposite: customers who received both weekly emails and a bi-monthly print catalog spent 15% more than email-only customers, and 49% more than customers who got no marketing at all \u2014 with order sizes up 15% as well. On the cost side, the study calculated roughly a 600% return on the added mailing expense. Print catalogs, in other words, aren’t a replacement for digital marketing \u2014 they’re a multiplier on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why a Catalog Works When an Email Doesn’t<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The same study surveyed customers on “product vividness” \u2014 essentially, how easily they could picture themselves owning or using a product \u2014 and catalog recipients rated it 5.6 out of 7, compared to 4.3 for email-only recipients. A catalog gives a product physical presence in a way a scrolling feed doesn’t: it can be flipped through, left on a table, and returned to more than once. That effect is strongest for what researchers call “hedonistic” purchases \u2014 the products people buy partly for how they’ll feel owning them, like jewelry, home goods, apparel, or travel \u2014 rather than routine, purely functional purchases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isn’t It Time to Reduce Catalog Printing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It’s a fair question, and a lot of businesses are genuinely asking it \u2014 both for cost reasons and because nobody wants a stack of catalogs going straight into a recycling bin unread. But the lesson from the research above isn’t “print less” so much as “print smarter.” The catalogs that drove those results weren’t blanket mailings to everyone in a database \u2014 they were a deliberate, recurring piece sent alongside a broader marketing plan. The businesses actually cutting back successfully aren’t the ones abandoning catalogs; they’re the ones moving away from oversized, one-size-fits-all print runs toward smaller, better-targeted editions that only go to people likely to act on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Green Catalog Printing: Doing It Without the Waste<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This is where sustainable printing and smart printing overlap almost completely. A few things make catalog printing genuinely greener rather than just labeled that way:<\/p>\n\n\n\n