How to Measure the Success of a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign

Once your direct mail campaign has been executed, you can use the resulting data to guide your next. The best-converting campaigns are based on the success of previous ones. As long as your target market stays the same, what works for them should too.

Measuring the success of your campaigns is very easy in a digital campaign, but tracking the same metrics for direct mail marketing is more complicated.

How to Track Offline Campaigns

Although direct mail is still one of the most effective ways to market yourself, most businesses today are at least partially digital. So, you will probably need to be able to include the effectiveness of direct mail in your CRM.

If you want to compare online and offline efforts, import and optimise data from various sources, or track the success of a campaign over time, you will want the data stored digitally. To track your offline campaigns online, you need to use unique identifiers.

Unique Identifiers to Bring Offline Data Online

• PURLs: Personalised URLs unique to a recipient or group of recipients.
• Call tracking: Recording calls and call data lets you analyse the results later on.
• QR codes: An accessible way to guide people online from any offline marketing. 
• Response channels: specific channels for anyone that received your direct mail campaign, such as a hotline number.

Key Metrics to Measure

Customer Metrics

• Response Rate: To calculate your response rate, divide the number of responses by the number of direct mail recipients. This is important for working out which campaigns were most attractive to your target market. It’s another way of phrasing ‘lead generation’.
• Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of recipients that took the action your direct mail marketing was intended to incite. If response rate tells you how many leads your marketing generated, conversion rate tells you how many of those were high quality.

Financial Metrics

• Return on Investment: ROI is measured with the formula: Net income / Cost of investment x 100. It’s one of the best bargaining tools for future campaigns, as investors and stakeholders like to see exactly how much money an idea will generate.
• Customer Lifetime Value: While conversion rate indicates the success of a campaign on a specific action, Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) indicates its impact on your business overall. CLTV tells you how much revenue a customer is likely to generate over their entire relationship with your business.
• Cost Per Acquisition: Cost Per Acquisition works out how much it costs to gain each new customer as a result of the campaign. Ideally, this will be a low number, while the conversion rate is high. That would indicate a successful campaign with a low cost and a high ROI.

Marketing Metrics

• A/B Testing: To conduct A/B testing, send 2 variations of the same campaign to 50% of recipients each. The fewer differences, the better, because that makes it easier to work out which factors caused differences in response. A/B tests let you fine-tune the subtle differences that work for specific audiences.
• Personalisation Effectiveness: An example of an A/B test might be personalisation vs. non-personalisation. Personalisation Effectiveness compares response rates to gauge the success of personalisation efforts. Generally, personalisation does work better, but testing against new segments or markets is important.

Measuring Your Direct Mail Campaign

The best way to keep your marketing efforts generating as much revenue as possible is to constantly measure what you’ve done right. While digital campaigns are almost always innately trackable, the effectiveness of direct mail is more difficult to quantify.

Partnering with an experienced direct mailing service like Active Mail makes generating the best ROI easy. We can manage the entire campaign – from strategy and planning to execution and analytics.

Speak with us to find out more.