With the increase in online activities in the current age, there’s no doubt online marketing is taking the world by storm. It seems the world is slowly forgetting the value of offline marketing in the process of finding better and more effective means of reaching out to the market. However, some offline tactics like direct mail marketing are still effective and have been proven to drive better results. As such, the idea of offline marketing still holds, and for those who’ve realized the gains, the online alternative comes second.
Dropping a few letters, postcards, or brochures into the mailbox of your prospect customers is an ideal way of reaching out to them with your product’s information. One of the main reasons why this method works is that it’s easier to understand the content of the mail, and, therefore, your target clients won’t have to invest so much time trying to put things together since the content is straightforward. Moreover, studies show that direct mail has better response rates compared to email marketing. However, whether you choose the online or offline path, the success of marketing campaigns depends on how relevant you are to your ideal audience, and it’s best seen from the results of your direct mail campaign. Therefore, on top of flooding your customers’ mailboxes, you should always track and measure the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign.
So, how do you measure the results of your direct mail campaign? One of the indicators that things are working out is an increase in conversion rate. Not every mail piece you send will turn out successful, but the greater the number of successes the more effective your direct mail campaign is. However, it takes some effort to get there, and that means you’ll have to do a few things to achieve your goals.
Follow the steps below if you want to track and measure the effectiveness of your mail campaigns.
Establish a Direct Mail Tracking Method
You should always have a tracking method for your direct mail campaign to help you trace sales and leads back to your mail pieces. When setting up a tracking method, ensure that the points of contacts included in your mail piece are unique, so that it’s easier to attribute the sales to the mail campaign. You can have one or more of the following tracking methods for your direct mail piece depending on your business needs.
Trackable Phone number
It’s easier to measure your direct mail’s response rate through call tracking. For this to work effectively, ensure you have a unique number for each mail piece. You can track phone calls in one of the ways listed below.
- Create a toll-free number that automatically forwards to your business line so that you can keep track of the number of calls coming through this line to determine your response rate.
- If you’re using your regular business line on your direct mail piece, ensure you monitor each coupon redemption and the mailpiece it appeared on.
- Find out the services offered by the call tracking Software Company you’ve chosen. Normally, they’ll give you the ability to playback the calls you receive, including reporting and data analytics.
- Trackable URL
It’s important to create a URL that’s unique to your direct mail campaign, and that leads to one of the landing pages on your website. With this, you’ll be able to use the analytical tools in your site to find out the number of people who visited the page. To give it a more personal touch, you can set up personalized URLS that takes your target recipient to a landing page with content specifically meant for them.
Coupon Codes
Be sure to include a coupon code on your mailer which is redeemable either on your website, over the phone, or in your store. However, if you’re accepting codes over the phone, ensure you ask for the code each time you take an order.
QR Codes
You can include a QR code in your direct mail piece that’s linked to a unique landing page on your website whenever it’s scanned by a client. From here, you can track the number of people who visited this page from your website analytics account to measure the response rates.
Determine Your Direct Mail Performance Indicators
Success is defined by the number of the set goals you achieve. In the same way, not unless you lay down the goals you’d like your direct mail campaign to achieve, you won’t be able to measure the effectiveness your mail campaign. So, first things first – determine the purpose of your campaign. Is it to increase sales or raise awareness? Or maybe you want to unearth new leads. Once you’ve identified the goal for your direct mail campaign, you can proceed to use simple metrics to measure the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign.
Some of these metrics include:
- Conversion Rate – This measures the number of direct mails that converted to sales. It’s well-suited for businesses with longer life cycles.
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – This measures how much it costs you to get a new customer. Be sure to compare the CPA for your different marketing channels and choose one that’s the most cost-effective.
- Average Order Size –this tells you how much income has been generated from each of the sales produced by your direct mail campaign. This value can be calculated by taking note of the orders you’re already receiving or by using data originated from your direct mail campaign.
- Revenue per Order –This is used to determine the amount of profit made from each order. We get this by getting the difference between the average order size and the cost per acquisition.
Depending on the goals of your direct mail marketing campaign, you can use one or two of the mentioned metrics to gauge the success of your mailer. Therefore, ensure you set your marketing goals before you start measuring the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign.
Mail Out Your Campaign and Gauge the Outcome
Having put proper tracking methods in place and set goals for your marketing campaign, you can now send out your direct mails and collect some data. You can then use the performance metrics to see how much of your goals have been achieved.
Follow the steps above to get most out of your direct mail marketing campaign.
Posted on Wednesday, September 18th, 2019 at 5:06 pm in Latest News.
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