Everything you need for success in the modern marketing organization
Introduction
Measure the effectiveness
of your direct mail program
Are you measuring the success of your marketing campaigns?
Specifically, can you tie your direct mail back to revenue? Does
that question make you break out in a cold sweat?Success varies in every organization, and can range from influence on opportunities created to the impact on revenue.
This guide will help you identify how to measure success within your organization.
As a high level approach, we recommend:
Measure what’s important.
Find the success metric that works best for your organization, establish your benchmark
and measure progress.
Measure it consistently.
Use consistent metrics to measure the success of one program versus another. If you measure one
direct mail’s effect based on MQLs created and another’s based on web visits, you’ll have a difficult
time comparing the success of each campaign.
Part 1
Driving action with direct mail
If you’re not asking your audience to take action, you are
missing a huge opportunity. Your direct mail should incorporate
a call to action (CTA) that causes a lead or prospect to perform
a specific task.
- Visit website to sign up for service
- Complete a form to receive additional information/resources
- Contact us for a free demo
- Call for more details
Make sure you know your audience and ask for what’s appropriate when you ask them to take action.
Personalized calls to action
According to DMA’s 2015 Response Rate Report, a typical direct mail response rate is 3.4%, and that rate drops if you use a lesser-qualified prospect list. The good news?There
are ways of increasing your response
rate dramatically.
Using a personalized URL (PURL)
is an effective way to improve your
response rates. A PURL is to direct
mail what a tailored suit is to a sport
coat from Sears.pfl.com/KenSmith
This web page would welcome Ken
Smith with a personalized message.
Any activity by Ken would link back to
him AND the specific campaign. No matter what page your customer
visits, whether personalized or
general, be sure to include some way
to capture the visit. Forms work well
for getting lead info, even things as
basic as an email address. Any additional contact details you can
get will help you measure campaign
success. Most marketing automation
solutions will have built-in reporting
capabilities that allow you to seeProgressive profiling
Progressive profiling will boost lead generation and qualification significantly. It will allow
you to have higher conversion rates, better visitor experiences and a happy sales team.
For a more detailed discussion of progressive profiling, take a look
at our piece on Data Planning for
Direct Mail.
Campaign-specific calls to action
Gain insight into the success of your call-to-action.
Phone calls
Remember the phone? Some people still use it. And there are third-party telephony solutions that allow you to provide unique campaign phone numbers for tracking. Using these solutions, you can add a trackable phone number to the CTA within your automated direct mail. Whenever that phone number is called, the system recognizes that phone number and records the touch point back into your existing customer relationship management (CRM) system. While snazzy, this advanced capability goes beyond the scope of this overview, as it includes multiple third-party solutions talking to one another. However, you may want to explore tracking incoming calls at the campaign level. If your marketing automation solution can see the call activity via your CRM, you can tie it to the individual program’s success. Most solutions offer out-of-the-box integrations to take advantage of that cross-communication.Part 2
Measuring lifecycle influence
“How is automated direct mail affecting our lead lifecycle?” is a straightforward question. Obtaining these numbers, though, can feel like chasing the proverbial white whale. Setting up
your direct mail campaign is easy with solutions like Tactile Marketing Automation (TMA), but
every organization has a different lifecycle process. Many companies have challenges with
funnel measurement in general. Since
these metrics are tied directly to an
organization’s internal processes, we
recommend using the method that
best aligns with your organization.Process issues can
affect lifecycle measurement.
While these aren’t directly tied to
automated direct mail, they can
impact the way your organization
measures overall marketing success.Process issue #1
If sales reps don’t add contacts
to opportunities in your CRM, the
system has no visibility into the
opportunity success.Process issue #2
If your organization sends all leads
to a stage like marketing qualified lead
(MQL), creating an MQL measurement
would inflate those statistics.Process issue #3
If a rep doesn’t follow process and
update a lead appropriately, the
automated direct mail campaign may
not receive success credit. The following concepts will help
guide you through some lifecycle
decisions. We recommend
customizing these to match how
your organization measures funnel
influence on other programs.Simple funnel measurements
Need a place to start? Try measuring if the automated direct mail piece has any effect on your organization’s funnel.Get a high-level view on how direct mail is influencing your lifecycle.
Tracking
If an automated direct mail piece is
sent to a recipient and that recipient
moves down the success path
(MQL, etc.), that automated direct
mail piece would receive credit for
influencing lifecycle success.Advanced funnel measurement
Looking at a more detailed level provides insights on how your automated direct mail is influencing your organization’s lead lifecycle. In this scenario, you would be able to tie a direct mail piece to a specific contact and their individual prospect/ customer journey. This kind of visibility is built on deeply integrated marketing automation and CRM systems, which may (or may not) exist in your organization today. The benefit of this model is it provides you with the ability to easily measure how programs are impacting different stages of the funnel. The drawback of this approach is it heavily relies on an organization’s internal processes. We only recommend using the approach if your company has a well-defined funnel process in place.Tracking
Instantly see how direct mail is impacting your funnel.
Part 3
Approach to custom successes
Sometimes, you may have a custom goal you want to measure.
Don’t compare apples to oranges—in other words, don’t rely
solely on standard measurements that you use across all your
automated direct mail programs. If you want to track when a specific registration occurred,
we recommend tracking that success separately.How can you define these custom measurements?
Your marketing automation solution should provide numerous options, like adding certain requesters to a list or to an existing campaign in your CRM. While the results will not show up in high-level reports, you can always analyze the results via more granular reports. In the previous example, we recommend tracking Responded as the high-level success, and then adding White Wine Requesters to a specific list for custom tracking.Advanced measurements
Sometimes businesses value other intangibles like brand awareness. Organizations may also value
metrics that require some custom analysis. We won’t cover these metrics as part of this guide but here
are a few to consider:
Renewal rates
After sending automated direct mail to customers with renewals in Q4, did your organization
see any renewal rate change from last year?
Lifetime value
After sending automated direct mail gifts this year, do you see the customers in your control
group spending more than they did last year?
Conclusion
The benefits are
worth the effort
Best practice organizations measure the effectiveness of all their
marketing programs, including automated direct mail.Take time to set up your measurement criteria
appropriately and you’ll start to see stories emerging from your data.
Direct Mail Measurements
Ensure that every automated direct
mail piece contains a CTA that drives
the recipient to a website for further
action. This will serve as your initial
success metric. Use the personalized
CTA or campaign-specific CTA.Lifecycle Success Metrics
Track if that automated direct mail
leads to a high-level lifecycle success.
If your lifecycle model and processes
are mature, use the advanced funnel
measurement approach.