Direct mail is a great marketing tool and can provide a lot of valuable insights about your customers. How do you know if your direct mail campaign worked? Measure your campaign’s success with these four steps.
1. Start with a Plan
Start your direct mail campaign off with a plan and know what you would like to accomplish. If you dive into creating your campaign without determining your goals or metrics, it will be difficult to wade through all of the data you collect and understand what information you need to pay attention to. Before you send it out, go ahead and decide with your team what your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will be. Some popular KPIs for direct mail are Cost per Acquisition, Return on Investment, Customer Lifetime Value, Response Rate, etc. It’s important to note that your KPIs will look different from other companies and may even vary from campaign to campaign.
2. Track Your Responses
As you design your mail piece, include ways you can easily track responses. Some ideas for how you can do this are creating a customized url for that particular mail piece, creating PURLs (personalized urls) which have your customer’s name on them and send them to a personalized landing page, creating a specific coupon code, or adding a QR code to the mailer. All of these options will let you see exactly who has responded and what channel they used.
3. Pay Attention to Other Responses
Not everyone who receives your mail piece will take action on the links and codes you put on the mailer. However, they may still be responding to it. Watch for an increase in traffic to your website, social media platforms, and stores. You may even experience higher call volumes or downloads from your website. If you track these interactions, you can match them up with your mailing list to see who responded to the mailer.
4. Analyze Your Responses
Direct mail campaigns tend to have a longer life cycle than their digital media counterparts, so gathering responses will take time. Once you have your response data, be sure to analyze it. Direct mail analytics can reveal information about which regions, neighborhoods, and even households were the most successful. Not only can the data pinpoint locations, but there are literally hundreds of data points that can be analyzed about your campaign. This information is extremely useful in letting you know what parts of the campaign were successful and what parts weren’t.
As you measure the success of your campaign, don’t stop with the overall response rate. Really examine your data, so you can see how to tweak the design, refine your message, enhance your process, or even change up the mailing list. All of this information will enable you to make informed decisions on how to adjust and help you achieve greater results on the next campaign.