With rising postage costs and all the digital alternatives, you may wonder if direct mail is worth including in your marketing efforts. In most cases, the answer is yes – but it’s important to let analytics drive your decision making so you’re optimizing the spend.
Begin by thinking about what you can track to prove a direct mail piece’s efficacy. That may include direct actions, like scanning a QR code, visiting a personalized landing page (PURL), or clicking on an Informed Delivery image. Your campaign may have a residual impact as well, so it’s worth considering indirect actions too. While actions like store or website visits during a specific time may be more difficult to attribute to a particular marketing effort, they could be related.
DIRECT MAIL ANALYTICS
As you’re planning a campaign, think bigger than just print. How can an omni-channel approach let you make the best use of your marketing budget and reach people in the ways that resonate? At the same time, think about which actions fit your consumer journey. Is it reasonable to expect your direct mailer to initiate a purchase? Or would it further someone along on an awareness journey?
The answers to these types of questions drive the recommendations we make to SeaChange clients every day. Once we’ve defined the end goal, we can work backward to determine the best approach. Sometimes that means everyone gets a direct mail piece. Other times, we recommend reserving direct mail for people who have taken an action or been prequalified via a digital platform. This approach can open an opportunity to send fewer, higher-quality materials that really stand out with unique folds, foil techniques, etc.
WHAT KPI'S ARE IMPORTANT TO YOUR BUSINESS
Return on reinvestment (ROI) is always a key measure, but what you track beyond that depends on the goal of your campaign. If you’re trying to increase brand awareness, you don’t necessarily need to see an immediate action. On the other hand, if you know someone is close to making a purchase and you’re offering a discount code, you want to know if they’ve used it. That’s why it’s important to understand where your consumers are in the funnel: awareness, consideration, or conversion.
While every company and campaign will track different KPIs, here are some to consider:
• PURL visits
• QR code scans
• Incoming calls
• Business reply card use
• Informed Delivery clicks
• Discount code or coupon use
• Text sign ups
Also, make sure your mailing list is up to date, so you aren’t spending money on direct mail pieces that won’t be received. We can check against the USPS’s national change of address database (NCOA), national do-not-mail lists, and a deceased database to ensure you aren’t mailing to invalid addresses.
HOW SEACHANGE CAN HELP
With expertise in postal issues, printing, strategy, and analytics, we can help you figure out the best approach for your campaign’s unique needs. Then, we can make tracking and analyzing data easy. Using our easy-to-understand dashboard view, our full-service GATHER Digital Agency can show which methods of communicating with your audience are most effective and make recommendations for ways to evolve your next campaign.
Want to know more about data analytics for direct mail? We’d love to connect.
