Strategy: Circulation Planning

I highly recommend doing matchbacks. If you’re not yet doing them, and you’re relying solely on what you can report on by key, mail your Web buyers. To a great degree, the catalog drives Web sales. I’ve seen Web buyer segments perform four to six times what they report on by key (after matchback). Web buyers tend to use the Internet to order and therefore, are less likely to use a source code. So, when using prematched results, if your performance cutoff is $1 per catalog for housefile and you have a Web segment that’s doing $.80 per book, you should mail it. That segment likely is doing at least $3 per catalog mailed.