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Tracking Postcard Campaign Results

Written by: Barbara Spagnola

Article Overview: You have painstakingly designed your postcards with attention grabbing photos, imagery and headline. You believe you have selected the best mailing list for your target audience. After all this careful planning, how will you know if your campaign is successful?

Tracking Postcard Campaign Results

You have painstakingly designed your postcards with attention grabbing photos, imagery and headline. You believe you have selected the best mailing list for your target audience. After all this careful planning, how will you know if your campaign is successful?

During the planning phase of the campaign, you defined your goals. For this particular campaign, you wanted to increase the number of orders coming through your web site. You offered a special discount that is valid for 30 days. How will you distinguish between orders coming from the web site that are a result of the postcard campaign versus normal traffic to that webpage?

One solution might be to direct your postcard campaign recipients to special URL/web page such as www.yoursitename.com/offer11. Another way to track this new customer would be to use a promotion or coupon code unique to this mailing. The promo code is used during the checkout process in order to receive the discount offered on the postcard. This code can be used to track the number of orders received as a result of the postcard campaign.

Perhaps your campaign goal is to get people to contact you so they can receive free brochure materials about your latest life insurance plan. An easy and inexpensive way to track results that are coming from phone calls is to use a different 800 number specific to this campaign. The cost is minimal and your monthly statement will show you the number of calls received. Your phone bill statement is much more accurate than asking your customer service team to keep track of how many calls they received as a result of the postcard campaign.

Another method for measuring campaign effectiveness is to stagger the mailing of the postcards. For example, you order 5,000 postcards and for the first campaign you will send 1,000 cards. But you would like to control and gauge how the postcards are received before mailing all 1,000 cards. You decide to send out 250 a week so that your response rate is more manageable and you can make minor changes to the postcards if needed before mailing all 1,000 cards.

Since postcard marketing is only one component of your marketing strategies, it is important to know its effectiveness. As you do each campaign you learn more about your target audience and what resonates with buyers and what doesn’t. Whether you select a promo or coupon code, an 800 number or have a special web site address, knowing the effectiveness of the postcard campaign compared to your other marketing methods is valuable information for your future planning and budgeting.

Related Articles
  Planning Your Postcard Campaign
  Designing a High Impact Post Card
  Repeat Mailings for More Business
  Postal Service Postcard Mailing Guidelines
  Who is Your Target Audience?

Article Tags: campaign effectiveness, campaign goal, cards, checkout, coupon code, customer service team, free brochure, imagery, insurance, life insurance plan, phone calls, planning phase, postcard campaign, postcards, promo code, response rate, target audience, traffic, url web, web page



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