When MobilePlanet, a mobile computing and wireless products reseller, launched MobilePlanet Enterprise — its business-to-business endeavor (www.mobileplanet.biz) — the company did what any self-respecting online marketer would do: It promoted its Web site by mailing some 60,000 copies of a brand-new paper catalog.

The catalogs went out Sept. 8 to 48,000 people on its house file and 12,000 names taken from compiled lists.

“We prospect by matching our customer demographics with those in compiled files,” says Steve Vivanco, vice president of technology and strategic marketing.

Fortunately, MobilePlanet kept a few copies in reserve: During the first two weeks of its introduction, the Chatsworth, CA firm received 400 requests per week for the catalog, according to Vivanco.

But that paled in comparison with the 15,000 unique visitors the Web site pulled every day since the catalog's rollout. Granted, a multichannel effort supported it: In addition to the 60,000 or so catalogs, the B-to-B site was touted in two separate e-mail campaigns to MobilePlanet's customer base, which totaled 200,000 efforts. MobilePlanet also featured the B-to-B site on its consumer site's home page.

The catalog is largely intended as a traffic builder. Its 32 pages could contain only a fraction of the products the site offers — and that's before the company made the decision to fill its pages with editorial content that geared half of the book toward specific vertical markets, and the other half toward meeting general business needs.

“Recipients read the catalog to learn about technology and find out how it's applied,” says Vivanco.

“Certain products that meet the needs are sprinkled in there.”

The catalog's footers feature the company's URL, which varies based on the content of each page and steers customers toward specific locations on the Web site, where featured products are found.

The initial mailing tracked five different recipient cells: three product affinity groups, a sample of the general house file and a lapsed customer reactivation segment. Additional segmenting and variations on ink-jet messages on its cover are planned for future mailings.

The new catalog grew out of feedback from MobilePlanet's customers. “We started seeing requests for us to provide services not just to mobile professionals, but to business entities,” says Patricia Koprowski, director of sales and customer service.

While the new catalog marks the first time the company has promoted a separate business-to-business line, it has regularly produced a consumer catalog since 1994, and currently sends out about 300,000 copies of it per month, according to spokeswoman Jennifer Camargo.