The importance of tracking source codes

Direct marketers need data, and they need to massage and analyze that data to make certain that every prospect effort and every customer contact is better than the last. Tracking orders via source codes (also called sales codes or key codes) is one of the most important ways to measure customer and prospect marketing efforts. In an ideal world, catalogers would like to know where every order came from. While this may not be possible, catalogers must be diligent in tracking source codes, because the catalog business is statistically driven, and measurement is crucial. The Internet is a villain when it comes to tracking orders. A growing number of Internet orders go into the uncoded category and must be matched back against the mailing list to ascertain whether the catalog actually drove the order.