One of the most important things in ecommerce marketing is ROI. Most online channels can give you a very accurate ROI – as long as you’re taking all factors into account. If you carry out mail order activity, do you know what impact that has on your online efforts?

1. What Impact Does Catalogue Mailing Have On Your Online ROI?
One of the most important things in ecommerce marketing is ROI. Most online channels can give you a very
accurate ROI - as long as you’re taking all factors into account.
Affiliate marketing can be a very cost effective form of online marketing. The setup costs can be low, and the static
monthly fee means the more sales you make the higher your ROI, or does it?
Email marketing is, more often than not, the most cost effective form of online marketing. The larger your
database and the more responsive your lists, the higher your ROI – in theory.
If your brand carries out any offline marketing such as catalogues or postal offers, do you know what impact it has
on your online marketing and the effect on your online ROI?
Over the past few years we have looked into the impact such offline material, catalogues in particular, has on the
ROI of your online marketing.
The Plan
The intention throughout the analysis being carried out was to determine what impact offline catalogue mailings
have on online sales and therefore what weight should be given to this when determining the online budget.
For this study we looked at the sales through the email, portal and affiliate channels of 3 of our mail order clients
over the past 2 years.
To carry out the analysis we:
1. Established the time period we wanted to attribute to each catalogue mailing
If you mail a postcard with a discount offer code it is easy to establish the resulting orders from that
mailing via that specific code. With catalogue mailing it’s a little harder. For the purposes of this study we
looked at the seasonal periods of Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer from the time the first catalogue
mailed to the end of the season.
2. Extracted order numbers
For each email sale within established the period we extracted the order number. For each affiliate and
portal sale within the period we extracted both the order number and affiliate/portal name.
3. Carried out a “matchback”
We carried out a matchback against the mailing data by matching each of the portal, affiliate and email
order numbers and against order numbers within the catalogue mailing file.
The result of this “matchback” allowed us to separately analyse those portal, affiliate and email customers who had
received at least one catalogue through the season and those that hadn’t.
There are obviously additional factors that could affect the accuracy of such a matchback, for example “non-
catalogue” customers seeing a catalogue in-store or a different person at a previous customers address placing an
order. However, as long as the data you are analysing is large enough, the effect of these factors will be minimal
and should therefore not affect the overall findings.
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2. Results
The results showed there is little variation in matchback percentages between autumn/winter and spring/summer.
Email
The analysis showed that on average 76% of email orders were matched back i.e. 76% of customers ordering via
email had also received a catalogue. This isn’t a surprising number as the most responsive email lists are for
previous customers who will therefore have received a catalogue. It is positive to see that 24% of orders via email
are actually from non-catalogue customers. As each new customer is likely to be added to the mailing list for the
following season and as this percentage is consistent over time, it shows that the email channel is acting as a
customer acquisition and/or reactivation channel as well as retention.
Portals
Portal analysis gave a very low matchback percentage of 35% showing that portals are a very good recruitment
channel, allowing you to market your product to a wider market.
Affiliates
The most interesting results from the matchback are from the affiliate channel. Affiliates as a whole had 70%
matched back sales. As we included the affiliate name within the affiliate order extract we are able to see the
number of matched back down to individual affiliate level. The spread was across the spectrum, from 0% to 100%.
During one season we saw a client with an affiliate driving 31% of total affiliate sales but 95% of those were
matched back, another affiliate was driving only 10% of affiliate sales but just 58% matched back. A quick glance
at these 2 affiliates without this analysis would possibly see you pushing the 31% sales driver harder. These results
allowed us to see that the 10% sales driver actually sent 94% more “new money”.
Additionally the results showed that there were certain types of affiliates that were driving more “new money”.
Through the analysis we have seen instances where voucher code affiliates have drievn a low percentage of
matchback sales but not a very high volume, a similar situation has been seen for cashback affiliates. These results
therefore showed in these instances incentivising these groups of affiliates is likely to be more profitable than
encouraging the PPC affiliates that are driving more volume of sales but a much higher matchback.
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3. Conclusions & Actions
Overall the analysis allowed us to get a clear idea of the impact of catalogue mailings on our clients’ online
channels and therefore allowed us to effectively produce both budgets and strategies for each channel.
Email
As the ROI on the email activity is very high there is little action that needs to be taken from a budget point of
view. It does however show that getting enquirers onto your email list is very important to encourage customer
acquisition.
It is worth pointing out that although 76% of email orders are matched it is not possible to quantify the number of
customers who would not have placed an order, despite receiving a catalogue, had they not received an email
prompt or email offer to encourage them.
Portals
As portals are generally harder to bring a strong ROI, this analysis allowed us to look at this channel as a
recruitment tool enabling the clients to establish the value per portal customer and the price they are willing to pay
to recruit each customer. This gives a much more solid basis from which to run portal activity.
As we carried out a matchback for each portal, and therefore established an accurate ROI per portal, it allowed the
clients to establish a cost per customer for each individual portal. Based on this, we were able to review the
product feed for each portal and optimise it (for example, removing individual products/categories achieving a low
ROI or increasing CPC on certain product types) to help achieve the necessary cost per customer. In some cases,
we established the portal was unable to achieve the necessary cost per customer and therefore activity was turned
off.
Ensuring you have an accurate ROI per portal is important in making the most of this channel. Combining this with
the product level tracking provided by the portals themselves gives you a strong base for optimising this channel.
Affiliates
Using the results we were able to establish a clear affiliate budget with a strong ROI and implement a clear affiliate
strategy, in some instances down to individual affiliate level.
The results allowed us to highlight individual affiliates that we want to encourage and with whom we want to build
a 1-2-1 dialogue/relationship as well as those we don’t want to focus on. We don’t suggest turning off any affiliates
that are driving predominantly matched sales, more that that you plan for this group separately. As with email, it is
not possible to quantify the number of affiliate matchback orders that would have been lost had the customer not
had contact with the affiliate. Therefore turning off these affiliates may result in lost sales.
If you are able to establish a clear ROI per affiliate you are able to quickly build a clear picture of where you should
be focusing both your time and budget.
If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you improve your online ROI just get in contact today.
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01865 980 630
info@indiumonline.co.uk