Track Your Results with Source Codes

The best approach is to “match back” the responders to your original mail tape to see, by code, who responded. Save the original mail tape, and once the catalog campaign is 80-percent complete, match the people who made a purchase since your mail date against the mail tape. If they made a purchase since the mailing, chances are it was because they got a catalog in the mail if they also appear on the mail tape. This will tell you which code to assign credit. It’s probably not necessary to do the “match back” after every mailing, but by doing this once or twice annually, you’ll be able to determine the origin of the business by source code.