Putting a mailing campaign into motion is relatively easy. But you will find it hard to measure the results of your campaign, unless you have out some easy tactics into place first.
As with other marketing strategies, direct mail itself might not work with everyone and all industries. However, it performs exceptionally well when used in conjunction with emails, phone calls, or online marketing strategies.
To analyze the results of your campaign concentrate on:
Tracking Direct Responses
- Plan your direct mail campaign around a client response, like mailing in a form, or you will have to include other strategies in order to measure how many leads or sales were generated by your campaign. You could use a custom URL, for example, or a phone number, promotion code, or a certificate or coupon that the customer produces when buying your product.
- Make sure that the relevant personnel know what they should be tracking during the campaign. If you have a customer service center where orders are taken over the phone, the staff should know to ask for promotional codes and to report them.
- Depending on your goals, find the response rate (number of leads or sales generated) of your mail campaign. If you use a promotion code in order to track the results, divide sales made with that code by the total number of mail pieces sent to find the response rate. For example, if you sent 2000 mail pieces and made 42 sales using that promotion code the response rate would be 2.1%.
Measuring Incremental Sales
You can determine what your average sales should be during your campaign (without any other marketing activities), by studying data from past sale if you have these available. For example, if you plan on running your campaign during the first week of September, then see what your sales were like in past years during the same period.
Once your campaign is up and running, wait a couple of weeks before trying to measure the results. Because, unlike television or online promotions that show immediate effects—direct mail does not.
Take the total sales made during your mailing campaign, and subtract the total you have from historical sales data. This total will be the sales generated by your current campaign.
Control and Test
1. Divide your mailing list into two groups:
- a small group that you call the control group, and
- a larger group called the test group.
Make sure that both groups are similar demographically, to achieve more accurate results. This method works best with in-house lists and in companies where it is easy to track product purchases, like catalog businesses.
2. Send the test group your mail piece, but don’t send it or any other marketing material to the control group.
3. Calculate the revenue per customer during the campaign by determining the total revenue for the control group, and divide that by the number of people in the control group. Then do the same calculation for the test group. For example, if the people in your control group numbered 100 and the purchases they made came to $2000 during your campaign, then you would divide $2000 by 100 to get the total revenue per customer, which would be $20.
4. Subtract the revenue per customer of the control group from the revenue per customer of the test group. If the revenue per customer in your control group is $20, and $50 for the revenue per customer in your test group, then your incremental value of your direct mailing campaign per customer would be $30.
Knowing how to measure the results of your mailing campaign will prevent you from wasting money on marketing strategies that are ineffective for your business.
Perform the same calculation for the test group. If your control group consisted of 100 people who purchased $2000 worth of products during the campaign, the revenue per customer for that group would be $2000 divided by 100, or $20. Determine total revenue for the control group during the campaign and divide that figure by the number of people in the group.
