Without Response Tracking, Your Mailing Isn't Marketing

Quantifiable response data is the soul of direct mail. How else do marketers judge effectiveness, read testing, improve results or budget by channel? Yet we sometimes see direct mail pieces that are long on creative appeal and short on response tracking strategy, a recipe for current and future marketing waste. For a primer on direct mail tracking methods, check out a 2015 Target Marketing magazine article by Summer Gould. Here are her seven suggested tracking devices: QR codes with a landing page for each campaign; PURLs with a unique landing page for each campaign; coupons with a code to track response on redemption; reply cards with a code for each campaign imprinted to track returns; a response phone number, either specific to each campaign or connected to a call center that asks for a code from the piece on intake; text messaging, either providing a special number for each campaign or requiring a code entry from the mail piece on the text response; a mail piece redemption that requires the recipient to bring the mailer with them to get a discount or some other special offer at a sales or event site. Mailers don't have to limit themselves to just one of these methods, of course; offering more than one way to get in touch can capture more responses by recipient preferences. For more detail, read http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/post/direct-mail-if-you-can-t-track-it-don-t-do-it/