5 Ways to Track Direct Mail

January 6, 2016

Learn how to boost ROI by closely monitoring your results.

You’ve worked hard to develop a powerful personalized direct mail campaign. The piece is beautiful. The colors are vibrant. You’ve got a great message and compelling offer … you think. But questions nag at you. Do you really have the right segments? Could your offer be stronger? How about your message? Should you be using different wording for one of the sub-segments? What about different images?

These questions can be answered by tracking your results. When you monitor and track on a regular basis, you begin to understand what’s working and what’s not, or what could be working better. Here are five ways to track your mailings to determine how well your audience is responding.

Use unique customer codes.

Use the power of our digital press to add unique customer codes to each mailer. Ask for this code when the customer calls in or have customers input their codes at checkout if they are ordering online. If you want to test elements of your design or messaging within the same mailing, codes can be used to track those efforts, as well. If you don’t want to use personalized codes, you can use promo codes to segment for specific products or offers.

Use Google Analytics to monitor web traffic.

Say you send out a direct mail piece and see a noticeable spike in traffic on your website. If there is no other reasonable explanation, you can assume that the additional traffic is due to the mailing. This is not going to be a precise measurement, but if you have not been running other campaigns, it’s a reasonable assumption.

Send a free gift.

Encourage people to write, call in, or go online to request a free gift. Every gift you send indicates a response to the campaign.

Create a campaign-specific site just for the direct mail piece.

Instead of sending people to your main company website, send them to a promo page created specifically for that campaign. Because this page exists only for that campaign, any hits will be due to the direct mail piece.

Use personalized URLs as the response mechanism.

Like campaign-specific sites, any landing on the personalized URLs will be due to the mailing. You can also use these microsites to further personalize content, whether based on your existing data or responses to survey questions. Once someone has landed on their microsite, you can further track and monitor their behavior, including whether they watch videos, download content,and how long they stay on which pages. This gives you insight into where they are in the sales cycle and their readiness for the next step.

Want to make it even easier to respond to personalized URLs? Use personalized QR Codes. By enabling people to access their URLs simply by scanning their codes, you give them all the benefits of personalized URLs without requiring them to type anything in by hand.

Direct mail is often given a bad rap as being difficult to track, but these are five SIMPLE yet HIGHLY EFFECTIVE methods of response tracking that anyone can do.

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