Direct mail can be a valuable promotional tool given the right conditions. In campaigns with well establish offers and lists, direct mail is consistently able to outperform email by over 3%. For many companies however, tracking direct mail results remains a significant issue, but with the right processes in place, this can easily be overcome.
The first step to measuring direct mails effectiveness is clearly understanding how you expect your target prospects and customers to respond to your offer. For every campaign, there are multiple avenues that this can happen.
The most effective and least intrusive form of direct mail tracking is the use of personalized landing pages or PURLs. PURLs enable you to add interest to your direct mail creative by enhancing and personalize your message with online content. More importantly, it also enables you to measure direct mail results by tracking the usage of each individual PURL.
Another way of using online content to track program results is the use of single landing page and promotional codes. Coupons or contests often use these codes as a way to identify visitors as part of a specific campaign.
A third often overlooked way of tracking direct mail results that is through the use of a unique 800#. Toll-free numbers are not expensive and relatively easy to set up once you know how. Getting a unique 800# for your campaign is a great way to streamline the customer experience because you’ll know immediately which campaign produced the inquiry without having to ask the caller.
Alternatively, if you decide to simply use your standard 800#, ensure that your call center team is asking callers where they heard about your company or the incentive. Because this 800# should be integrated into all of your marketing campaigns, it’s critical to link it back to the program that is producing the lead.
Similar to inbound phone calls, email can also be segmented by creating unique addresses for each campaign. The key is to make the process as simple and transparent to your target audience as possible. If you’ve done that, you’ll be better positioned to capture those leads, track direct mail results and identify the ROI of your entire campaign.
