Direct Mail Tracking & Measuring

Perhaps the easiest way to measure whether someone has been brought to your business through your direct mail campaign is to create a unique coupon or discount code.

This technique can be used for businesses of all sizes. If your business has a brick-and-mortar store, you can collect the coupons. We’ve seen well-established businesses like Tanger Outlets use this technique time after time again. Tanger includes physical coupons consumers have to bring in to receive their discount. They even include zip codes in their coupons to see exactly where the consumer is coming from.

Tanger Outlets has a more advanced strategy for using coupon codes in their direct mail projects, but it can be as simple as telling your consumers to mention they saw your ad in their mailbox. Just remember to track down each time the coupon code was used.

Using QR codes is an excellent way to track your direct mail piece. We’ve seen the uprise of them on printed pieces as more and more clients want more precise analytics. QR codes bridge the gap between ambiguity and measurable results in your direct mail campaign.

Putting a QR code on your piece to direct people to your website is the quickest way of tracking your results. If you’re going to do this, be absolutely sure to use UTM parameters in the QR code. The UTM parameters are the key to making sure people are scanning the code.

What we recommend is going a step beyond your normal website and building a custom landing page specific to the campaign you are sending out. With the custom landing page, you can easily see who is interested in your business. We suggest also putting in a contact form to collect your leads. This can be as fun as a custom quiz or having a more standard contact form. If you have multiple campaigns going out at once, it would be smart to create multiple landing pages.

Call tracking is one of the oldest tricks in the direct mail tracking book. The only catch with using a phone number to track your campaign is that you have to use a unique phone number separate from your day-to-day phone.

The phone number should be a toll-free number specific to that campaign so you can track each campaign.

You can have these calls directed to your office phone line without having to get another phone. We recommend to anyone going the trackable phone number route to try to get a phone number with the same area code as your business.

Once you have thought through the direct mail tracking part of your campaign, it is time to learn the key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs will help you fully understand what worked or what didn’t work with your campaign.

These formulas are just the tip of the iceberg, but we consider them the core KPIs of any direct mail campaign.

ROI gives you a quick idea of how your direct mail campaign panned out.

(Revenue – Cost of Campaign) / Cost of Campaign = ROI