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).