Abandon Attribution

The common sense approach to developing a mail plan outlined in this paper recognizes the difficulties in making accurate attribution in a multi-channel environment. The attribution effort far outweighs the sparse and often wrong information gleaned from the exercise. Instead, a simple paradigm is presented that relies on customer analytics to build integrated campaigns that deliver targeted, individualized mailings with higher response rates and at a lower cost than the current paradigm of separate email and postal campaigns that make extensive use of generic catalogs and depend on attribution to determine circulation. The new paradigm emphasizes profitability of the entire mail plan rather than focusing on revenue from each communications piece.