Measuring the results of your direct mail campaign

You have found an experienced and knowledgeable listing broker. With his help, she has selected the optimal direct mailing list based on her ideal target audience. He’s decided on the perfect design for his mail piece, and now he’s ready to go. But wait, how are you going to track your direct mail?

It was always thought that measuring the response rate of a direct mail campaign was almost impossible. With telemarketing you get an almost immediate response, with the prospect on the other end of the line. With email marketing, you receive detailed reports that measure open rates and click-through rates. However, with direct mail you don’t always know if your mail piece was successful in pointing potential customers in your direction. Your direct mail campaign needs a definitive call to action to help measure the success of your next direct mail campaign.

Here are some calls to action that can help you measure your success:

Personalized Promotional Codes

Make sure each piece of mail is imprinted with a personalized promotional code or unique offer identifiers. The codes must be customized for specific groups of recipients, such as those who live within a radius of each location or specific recipients based on gender or age. If your campaign promotes a product that the customer needs to buy in the store, the customer presents their personalized code at the point of purchase. If your campaign allows customers to call for more information, make sure they mention your unique promo code. This lets you know who came in or called and when. You can also provide information about if they bought, what they bought, and where they bought it from.

This gives you valuable insight into whether the campaign influenced interest in your product/service, as well as which of your placements is most receptive to a direct mail campaign.

unique landing pages

Another way to measure results is to use your email piece to take your prospects to a landing page, and then offer something on the landing page that makes them provide their email address or other contact information to download or retrieve. This gives you the best of both worlds when it comes to measuring your results: a quick and easy way to set up to drive the user to your website, statistics on the number of people visiting your website, and detailed contact information for leads you can go out and convert.

Provide a custom URL

As with the promo code, PURLS (Custom URL) can be as specific or broad as needed, depending on how defined you want your results to be. You can do this in two ways:

You can create a specific PURL for a landing page for each campaign so potential customers who want to learn more or make a purchase come to the landing page and are prompted for your call to action.

If you’re customizing your direct mail campaign and have to print pieces with variable fields anyway, you can also create an individual PURL for each customer. It can be as simple as generating PURLs ending in unique codes that are matched to the marketing database, but that will not only give you the responding numbers, it will tell you WHO prospects who viewed your website were.

Use QR codes

Using QR (quick response) codes in your direct marketing provides an immediate connection to the online and offline aspects of your marketing campaign. For mobile users, these provide an instant method of driving prospects to your website, rather than asking them to visit your site and select a particular page, or type in a long (or complicated) URL. The user scans the code with a smartphone and is immediately taken to the page in question. Again, you can have everyone go to the same landing page and just count page impressions, or you can create custom landing pages.

Don’t forget to try

This is one of the most important tips. Since mailing lists tend to be large, try sending your mailing piece to a small test group first. With the right call to action, it will allow you to determine how well your promotion will work. Running a trial will give you the opportunity to refine your direct mail campaign saving you time, money and hassle!

As technology is constantly changing, so should your marketing efforts. Lead generation and data collection are valuable marketing tools. Why not integrate them with the tried and true technique of direct mail? Turn your direct mail campaigns into data collection machines. It will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign, but it will also give you insight into your prospects.