When you are deciding how to spend your marketing budget, you want to know which marketing methods work. You want to know which offers work, and what gets you the most bang for your buck. The only way to know all of that is to track your success rates, but you might not be sure how to do that. If you need a few tips on how to track your successes in direct mail better, read on:
Create a Unique Offer
One of the best ways to track your direct mail success is to create a unique offer, which customers can only access through your direct mail marketing. Great ideas include paper coupons or gift certificates, or discount scratchers that they need to use in store. This way, you can track how many people are reacting to those items, without including other marketing streams.
Use a Separate Phone Line
Another easy way to track the response to your direct mail campaigns is to set up a separate phone line or extension for callers to make enquiries or place orders. Even directing them to a separate, manned mobile phone number or answering service can help to track how many respond to your mail. Just make sure that you limit the amount of time that they are waiting for a response. Messages should be returned within a day or two at the most!
Create a Separate Landing Page
Another, perhaps even better way to track the success of your direct mail campaign is to create a separate landing page and URL for your offer, and use that and tools like Google’s Analytics and on site forms to track visitors, conversions and other data. It is the best of both worlds.
Use a Baseline for Comparison
One of the most important things you can do when tracking the success of any marketing campaign is to have a baseline for comparison purposes. If this is your first direct mail campaign, then use your general sales statistics as a baseline, and compare sales before and after to determine whether your campaign is effective, and how effective.
If you have run direct mail campaigns before, then you should have collected data from those campaigns. Compare the cost of the campaign, the number of enquiries, the sales generated and the revenue generated. The more you can compare and analyze the better. When you have this data, you can calculate the cost per sale, and compare that to other types of marketing that you have been doing.
Keep What Works
When you track direct mail success, you are going to realize that there are common threads in your campaigns that work, and some elements that do not. Do not be upset by the failures. Use them as a learning experience, and inject future campaigns with more of what works, and less of what does not.
Tracking direct mail success is critical to perfecting your methods and materials. The more you know, the better prepared you will be the next time you launch a campaign, or you might find that you reach a point where a campaign works so well that you just replicate it from time to time.
