While digital marketing has made it easy to track open rates, click through and reach, many people think that means it's impossible to track offline marketing tactics.
Here are four ways we track direct mail campaigns at Colourwise to help clients achieve their commercial goals. We firmly believe that direct mail campaigns should be strategized, executed and measured like any other marketing tactic.
Promotional codes: Adding a unique discount or promotional code to your campaign will help track its success. Whether the code is entered online, quoted over the phone or shown in person at a counter, this helps measure the ROI as the code is not available through any other channel.
PURLs – Personalised URLs are a landing page that is great for sending direct mail to your current database. This allows you to customise a URL such as businessname.com.au/amysmith so that you can track your customers' online behaviour unique to them. It firstly shows you if they have visited the landing page, then it pinpoints whether they click on links, subscribe or purchase or read certain blogs – all great insights for your CRM and allows you to highly target them moving forward.
Send it solo – Try sending your direct mail during a low period where you are not conducting any other activity. Have your sales date from the month prior, and the same time period over the past three years, to help you get a sense of average traffic or sales or whatever it is that you want to improve. When you have this data, you can compare it to the data for this period, once you've distributed your direct mail campaign. If it's a discount, offer or request for a booking, then put a limited timeframe that customers should complete the action in, to encourage a prompt response. With no other marketing activity, you can see if there is an increase in results based on prior periods of the same nature.
Create a phone number or different landing page – different phone numbers have long been used to measure offline strategies (and even online strategies). A customer is more likely to phone a number in front of them, than to seek it out elsewhere, so if your new hotline is running off the hook, you know it's from your direct mail campaign!
Next time someone asks what the ROI will be for a direct mail campaign, you can explain the ways in which it can be measured and evaluated!
For more insights into how you can use print marketing in conjunction with your digital marketing efforts, speak to us today.