Eight Lessons You Can Learn From a Matchback
As a direct marketer, you have the advantage of measuring your successes (and unfortunately sometimes your mistakes) in ways that general advertising cannot. You meticulously test, code, track and analyze the results of your prospecting efforts. Such tactics have generated accurate metrics that helped guide you in meaningful directions. At least until recently.
Today, knowing from where your orders and customers hail has become increasingly difficult. It’s the rare direct marketer who can survive in a single marketing channel, and most have at least two channels: catalog and Internet. Add retail locations, special mailings and opt-in e-mail campaigns, and the task of tracking sales and allocating marketing dollars has become even more challenging.
That’s why the topic of matchbacks has been such a hot one in recent years. Simply stated, matchbacks have brought back your ability to connect marketing dollars with marketing results. Or in the case of larger companies with additional marketing channels (e.g., brick and mortar stores), sophisticated solutions have, for the first time, enabled the connection of non-direct revenue with direct-selling channels. This connection gives you the unprecedented ability to effectively allocate resources across channels.
Most matchback reports aren’t any different from normal keycode results reporting. They match orders with no keycode to names from the mail tapes whose keycodes you can identify. Once the name is identified, the appropriate keycode can be assigned to each previously unknown order source, and overall results for that list can be analyzed. See Simplified Matchback Report (below).
| Pre-matchback | Unknown Sales | Total Sales Allo- | |
| Sales | Matched Back to Code | cated to Source | |
| House list A | $4,000 | $1,400 | $5,400 |
| House list B | $2,271 | $455 | $2,726 |
| House list C | $1,906 | $1,100 | $3,006 |
| Unknowns | $3,755 | $800 | $800 |
| (31.4%) | (still unknown) | (6.7%) | |
| Total | $11,932 | $3,755 | $11,932 |
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Prior to the matchback, 31.4 percent of this merchant’s sales were from unknown sources. After the matchback, the proportion of unknown sales was reduced to 6.7 percent. This cataloger now can make informed decisions about where to allocate funds by looking at the detailed keycode results available.
Here’s what you can learn from looking at your matchback results.
1. Appropriate resource allocation by channel. When the Internet first took off, many companies thought customers eventually would stop ordering from the printed catalog and move exclusively to online ordering. And at first it appeared that the trend just might go that way as Web sales began to comprise 10 percent, then 20 percent, even 40 percent or more of total sales.
However, matchbacks have provided the proof that many catalogers needed to justify resource allocation to their marketing programs, as they show Web sales correspond directly to mailed catalogs. It’s accepted now that for companies that mail a printed catalog, typically 80 percent of their Web demand is generated by their catalog mailings. One has only to look at order curves on online channels to see that online order activity peaks around catalog in-home dates.
2. Statistical significance of your results. Did you receive enough responses to statistically prove that a result isn’t an anomaly but rather is representative of a pattern? Catalogers usually prefer to see at least 50 responses (orders) for a given group to say those responses are statistically significant. By performing a matchback, you increase the likelihood that groups will reach that minimum 50 responses, thereby enabling you to conclude statistically significant response patterns for each group.
3. List-rental results. Perhaps the most common reaction we get after performing a matchback for our catalog clients is: “Wow, I was going to omit that list from future mailings. It turns out instead that it’s one of my top-performing lists.” Matchbacks help you zero in on the best, most profitable lists.
4. The best way to optimize housefile mailings. It’s common practice to mail housefile names even if they haven’t purchased within the last 24 months. However, as those names get older on your file, the frequency with which they should be mailed declines. By bringing real results back to the table, matchbacks help you identify the best mailing frequency. In addition, they help you identify how deeply you can mail into older-name segments and determine which segments may be better off going into the pool for an optimization model with one or more of the co-op databases.
5. The best co-op model selection. The old adage, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” is an appropriate one for catalogers, particularly in the test stages of any mail campaign. Matchbacks help you to know which baskets to focus on by showing you where your investment delivered the best results. This is particularly important with co-ops where large universes of names are available if results prove promising.
6. How to create offers that pull responses. Matchbacks give you the raw data to accurately assess online order behavior based on target groups. These data can help you create catalog and online offers that target specific groups based on their buying behaviors. You’re able to look at key metrics such as: recency, frequency and monetary value per online buying group; how average order sizes differ across channels; and what customers are ordering from multiple channels.
7. Identify core customers. Many studies have shown that consumers who buy from more than one channel are more valuable than those who buy from a single channel. Matchbacks enable you to identify these multichannel customers and therefore target your contact strategy accordingly.
8. Track catalog tails. Sometimes it’s useful to match back orders even when a keycode was given. I’m continually amazed to find orders that came in during the month of, say, September with codes that were mailed last November.
Many experts note that a successful matchback rate must bring your percentage of unknown sales to 15 percent or less. But depending on your total sales, a successful matchback rate is anything that’s strategically and statistically useful. Typically, we like to see at least 65 percent of unknowns/Internet sales matched back to mailed codes.
From general decisions about what marketing channels to invest in, to detailed decisions about what outside lists to rent for specific mailings, matchbacks give you back the ability to know where to put your money in order to maximize results.
Terrell Sellix is vice president of marketing at McIntyre Direct, a Portland, Ore.-based, full-service catalog agency. Sellix combines her love of data analysis with a sensitivity to the human side of marketing that stems from four years of marketing good health concepts in West Africa. For questions, contact her at: (503) 286-1400.
- Companies:
- Marketry
- McIntyre Direct
