4 Ways to Track Your Direct Mail Campaign

Many businesses we work with believe it is almost impossible to track the success rate of a direct mail campaign. Your only hope is to cast your direct mail net and wish for the best. However, this is just not true – there are several ways to track the success of your direct mail campaign from development to the final piece.

While you are developing the piece consider the following:

A/B Testing

During the development phase, one way to test the potential success of a direct mail campaign is through developing an A and B test piece. A/B testing, compares two preliminary versions of a direct mail piece against one another to determine which one outperforms the other. If the group in test A  were more likely to call your company or visit your web page than the group in test B, then we know to keep developing campaign A and toss campaign B.

Offer and Call to Action

During the development phase, it is extremely important to take a hard look at your offer and call to action. When developing the offer and call to action ask:

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  Is the offer enticing enough for customers and businesses to utilize my service or product?
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  Does your call to action or CTA stand out from the rest of your piece? Does it make a statement?
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  Does your CTA make people want to act?  (i.e. bring this coupon get 20% off, download this free book to  learn how to become a multi-millionaire by retirement)

Once addressing these issues you are finally ready to send the final mailing piece and track the success of your campaign.

Track responses by offering multiple methods to respond:

Use specific tracked phone numbers for each mailing campaign. Using tracked phone numbers optimizes your ROI (return on investment) and improves your marketing tracking techniques. Using a call tracking software allows you to see which marketing campaigns are successful and which ones you can leave in the dust.

So, how does call tracking work? When running several marketing campaigns, you can use different phone numbers to track each campaign. Let’s say you ran two direct mail campaigns, the first in March and the second in November. Rather than just using your primary, everyday business phone number you generate two unique phone numbers for each campaign, so you know which campaign worked and where.

This data is important as it helps you make more strategic decisions about a direct mail campaign based on what works.

Create a simple landing page to capture new customer information and reinforce the offer

You may be able to see that data is key to determining the success of any marketing campaign. When running a direct mail campaign do not just suggest people to “visit your website for more information.” Get them to act to make a lasting connection!

How? Create a simple landing page on your business website where customers can receive your offer (free ice cream on your first visit, get 20% when you order today, take a survey and get $5 towards your next trip) and input their information. Your landing page can be as simple as asking for their name, contact phone or email, and where they heard about your company. Moreover, just like call tracking, your landing page can be used to track where people found your business using different coupon codes or by asking for a zip code.

When sending a campaign, train your staff to ask the right questions

When your staff is on board, it makes a world of difference to the quality of tracking. When new customers call or visit your company, train your staff to ask the right questions:

1.  What is your name or company?  
   
2.  What is your phone number, address, or email? 
   
3.  How did you hear about us?

Don’t be afraid to dig a little bit deeper for more information about how someone found your company. For example, a customer may say, I found you on Google. A staff member may say, “Wow that is awesome. What search words did you use?”  The more data you and your staff can collect from customers, the better your tracking will be.