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You have found a knowledgeable, experienced list broker. With their help you have selected optimal direct mailing list based on youMeasure results of Direct Mailr ideal target audience. You have decided on the perfect design for you mail piece and you’re now ready to go. But wait, how are you going to track your direct mail campaign?

No matter how much money, time, effort or other resources you are putting into your direct mail campaign, it’s only successful if you can deliver a measurable return on your investment (ROI). But how do you measure the results of a direct mail campaign?

It’s always been thought that measuring the response rate of a direct mail campaign was close to 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 measuring open rates and click thru rates. However with direct mail you don’t always know if your mail piece was successful in pointing prospective clients 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 a few Call to Actions that can help measure your success:

Personalized Promo Codes

Make sure each mail piece is printed with a personalized promotional code or unique offer identifiers. The codes should be personalized to specifically targeted groups of recipients, such as those living within a radius of each location or targeted recipients based on gender or age. If your campaign promotes a product that the customer needs to purchase in-store, the customer presents their personalized code at the point of purchase. If you campaign allows customers to phone in to learn more, make sure they quote their unique promotional code.  This allows you to know who walked in or called in and when. It can also provide information on if they bought, what they purchased and at which location it was purchased.

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

Unique Landing Pages

Another way to measure results is to use your mail piece to bring your prospects to a landing page, and then offer something on the landing page that gets him or her to provide their email address or other contact information to download or retrieve it. This gives you the best of both worlds when it comes to measuring your results: A quick and easy-to-set-up way to bring the user to your website, stats on the number of people who visit, and detailed contact information for leads you can go out and convert.

Provide a personalized URL

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

You can create a specific PURL for a landing page for each campaign, so prospective clients who want to get more information or make a purchase come to the landing page and are prompted to your call to action.

If you’re personalizing your direct mail campaign and you have to print pieces with variable fields anyway, you might as well create an individual PURL for each client. It can be as simple as generating PURLs ending in unique codes that relate to the marketing database, but that will not only give you the numbers that respond but will tell you who the prospects that 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 your marketing campaign. For mobile users, these provide an instant method of getting prospects to your website, as opposed to either asking them to visit your site and select a particular page, or type in an extended (or complicated) URL. The user scans the code with a smart phone and is taken immediately to the page in question. Once again, you can either have everyone come to the same landing page and simply count page impressions, or you can create personalized landing pages.

Don’t forget to Test

This is one of the most important tips. As mailing lists tend to be large, try sending your mail piece out to a small test group first. With the proper call to actions in place, it will allow you to determine how well your promotion will perform. Doing a trial run will allow 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 collecting are valuable marketing tools. Why not integrate them with the tried and true technique of direct mail. Make your direct mail campaigns into data collecting machines. It will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign, but also give you some insight into your prospects.