Strategy: Circulation Planning

For example, a cataloger typically mails several times during the holiday gift-giving season with a last drop on or around Dec. 1. When a matchback is run for the holiday mailings, the last drop receives a disproportionate amount of the credit to specific key codes. Again, matchbacks aren’t perfect — you have to use some logic and common sense. The chart (above right) provides a good example. Before the matchback, the response per catalog (RPC) for the housefile was $1.44 per catalog mailed. After the matchback, the RPC increased 74.3 percent to $2.51 per book. Of the total dollars matched back, 72.2 percent were credited to the housefile. With this amount of lift and allocation, proper circ planning can’t be done without first doing a matchback. This adds an extra, time-consuming step to the process. You simply can’t know week-to-week results by source code until you match back the order file to the mail tapes.