Special Report Matchbacks
Step 2: Determine how much you're willing to invest. Advanced matchback tools can come with prices that may be a bit too steep for smaller companies and may not be necessary for your level of business. Determine at what point the cost of a matchback will outweigh the impact of the sales decision. Take the following into consideration:
- the percent of unknowns to your overall sales,
- the proportion of your contact strategy that includes outside list sources, and
- if you suspect your allocation of marketing dollars will vary significantly based on the information.
Step 3: Study and compare resources. The discussion below addresses several possible solutions.
Low-cost matchbacks. If your marketing channels are limited or your budget tight, look for low-cost alternatives to the standard technologies available. You'll find that most data processing vendors offer some kind of matchback capabilities. Talk with your current data processing vendor to determine what kinds of matchback services it offers. It already handles your mailing files and is competent (or you wouldn't use its services). Costs can range from $500 to $5,000 depending on the quantity of names mailed and your vendor's pricing.
No-cost, faux matchback test. If your budget is extremely tight, a good way to keep matchback costs low is to go through the exercise of allocating unknowns based on several methods such as percent of total sales across the season, percent of total monthly sales per group or percent of marketing budget spent. Compare the results of these allocation methods with your matchback results. If the results for faux and actual matchbacks are close, you may be able to do fewer matchbacks in a given time period by using whatever allocation method seemed to give similar results. Don't skip doing actual matchbacks too frequently, however, as buying behaviors tend to change rapidly.
