There are a slew of digital tools to help businesses measure how well their products are selling and what engages their consumers.
Dashboards provide insights into the performance of every piece of content, enabling companies to better target their marketing resources for maximum effect.
For businesses who produce printed catalogues, there’s a specialist and highly effective tool that does a similar job: square inch (squinch) analysis.
This blog will offer a run-down of squinch analysis, how it helps brands maximise their printed media, and how our Renaissance platform can make everything easier.
What is a squinch analysis?
Squinch analysis has its roots in the 1990s boom in mail-order shopping, when direct marketers seized on the chance for big sales and hefty profits.
It is a method used to this day by brands. They allocate selling space in their catalogues to selected products, aiming to generate the maximum consumer interest, enhancing sales and profitability.
In a nutshell: squinch analysis enables brands to put the right product in the right place in their catalogues at the right time.
Calculating your squinch analysis
On the face of it, determining how much catalogue space is given to merchandise looks like fairly straightforward maths, but don’t be fooled.
It’s also a nuanced measurement tool that relies as much on data interpretation as cold, hard numbers.
Let’s examine the figures first. To determine the value of each product in your catalogue, at the end of every publishing cycle you should calculate:
- the total costs of your print catalogue (print, postage, mailing services)
- the total number of square inches in your catalogue
- product revenue (including print, online and “other”)
Next, you must measure your catalogue page. For example: a 5 x 10 inch page is 50 square inches.
You can use that figure to determine your costs per square inch as follows:
print, postage and mailing services ÷ the number of pages ÷ square inches per page = cost per square inch
This will give you an overall view of your catalogue page costs per square inch.
Allocating space in your catalogue
This is where things get really interesting. Businesses don’t just use these figures to ensure the offers appearing in their pages will provide a solid ROI.
There are reams of data points associated with each calatogue’s merchandise assortment that can optimise selling space allocated to each offering. It includes product or item number, item and category description and selling cost.
Units and merchandise offers can be evaluated in several ways, from product, price-point and category strength or performance, through to page efficiency.
By poring over the essential components of your catalogue data, you will not only identify products in each category that will sell for profit, you will also find answers to the following questions:
- What is the optimal page count for each offering?
- What are the best and worst-performing products/categories?
- How many items should be on offer per category/overall?
- Which price points and categories offer growth opportunities?
- Which products and categories should be removed?
When you have determined the relative strength of each category and overall effectiveness of your product mix, those valuable insights can be applied to future catalogues, potentially boosting their profitability.
You can determine the optimal page count for your catalogue, and enhance a category that is popular with customers. It also enables brands to give less space to or even remove categories that are not as engaging.
Your creative team can optimise the space on each page occupied by merchandise, while also balancing it with the space occupied by white space.
Getting that spot-on can help reduce the cost of production, enhance total sales and maximise ROI.
Renaissance squinch analysis
By now, the benefits of squinch analysis should be crystal clear. Now’s the time to address the elephant in the room: it is a labour-intensive process.
Most businesses don’t have the resources to devote to the granular analysis of their catalogues, and online tools will only get them so far.
That’s why brands come to us.
Utilising a combination of the sticky board for product placement and sales data, Renaissance automatically carries out this analysis of every square inch, displaying the coverage area of both image and text for each product featured on every page of your catalogue.
As well as drastically cutting the amount of time needed to collect square inch data, it also enables marketers to quickly and accurately measure their catalogue product placement ROI.
Let us examine every square inch of your catalogue
Our experienced team works with some of the UK's biggest brands and retailers. Many of them publish catalogues, including House of Bruar and The White Company using our award-winning Renaissance production worflow system.
We can help your business optimise sales with a page by page analysis of the product placement in its catalogue too.
Book a demo
If you have any questions about square inch analysis, or want to know more about what Renaissance can do for your business, drop us a line.
You can email us at info@ec2i.biz, call 01702 541311 or fill in this contact form and we’ll get back to you straight away.