How Yankee Candle Uses Matchbacks

With $737 million in net sales last year, The Yankee Candle Co. has a sizable amount of orders to sift through from sales made through its assorted channels — catalog, Web site, paid search, retail, direct mail, e-mail and newspaper inserts. Needless to say, having a reliable matchback program in place is crucial for the South Deerfield, Mass.-based multichannel marketer.

So during a session at last week’s NEMOA Conference in Cambridge, Mass., Dana Springfield, general manager of consumer direct at Yankee Candle, led a panel session along with Stacey Hawes, vice president of B-to-B services at the co-op database provider Abacus, and Jim Finnerty, vice president of operations for the data processing company I-Centrix, to discuss matchbacks and cross-channel marketing analysis.

The catalog remains Yankee Candle’s top-selling channel, Springfield pointed out, and the best representation of the company’s brand. But with catalog production and mailing costs on the rise, “We’re challenged to find ways to make that catalog work harder,” he said. Here are some tactics Yankee Candle implements for matchbacks and cross-channel marketing analysis.

* To determine how much the company can afford to spend on customer acquisition, Yankee Candle uses a nine-month time frame to evaluate its return on investment, Springfield said.

* The frequency of Yankee Candle’s matchback analysis is dependent on how the data is going to be used. For example, Springfield advised the audience to perform daily or weekly matchbacks for more operational data (e.g., tracking inventory). More evaluative data (e.g., the best contact strategy for a customer) should be done over a longer period of time — two or four times a year.

* The company matches its orders back to its housefile according to household, not customer name. “Telephone numbers are the most important data acquired,” Springfield said.

* Yankee Candle segments by RFMC, with the “C” standing for channel. The channel the customers order from makes a big difference in the offer they’re going to receive, Springfield noted.

* Multichannel customers hold the most value for Yankee Candle, Springfield said. Therefore, Yankee Candle is putting major efforts into converting Web buyers to multichannel buyers.

* On the other hand, Yankee’s matchback analysis has shown that retail-only customers aren’t worth trying to convert to multichannel customers. These customers generally stay at the store level, Springfield said.

* The company’s offers impact the order channels, Springfield said. Yankee Candle’s matchback efforts have led the company to conclude that the higher the threshold for the offer (e.g., spend $50 and get 10 percent off), the more traffic the marketer’s Web site draws.

* Ensure that if you’re going to invest the time in testing a matchback program, it needs to have a statistically readable result, Springfield advised.

* Archive your mail tapes, Springfield said, “you never know when you’ll need them again.”