How to Track Your Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail is an incredibly important aspect of a successful healthcare marketing strategy. Just as critical is the ability to track the effectiveness of such campaigns, and modify your approach, to achieve greater success.

Important Campaign KPIs to Monitor

Tracking the results of your campaigns is only one step of the process. You must also consider the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for your purposes to determine if your direct mail campaigns are successful in helping you reach your desired goals.

Identifying your primary direct mail campaign objects and measuring the considerations you care about most will enhance your marketing approach.

Some of the most important KPIs to consider when measuring direct mail effectiveness include:

Response Rates

This represents how many people responded to your direct mailers through any of their calls to action (CTAs), and helps assess the effectiveness of your content at stimulating meaningful engagement.

Conversion Rates

This details how many prospects have taken steps toward becoming customers, and where they are at every level of the buyer’s journey.

Recognizing how your direct mail audience progresses along the flywheel can help amplify the impact of your messaging and direct mail campaigns to better resonate with your prospects.

Cost Per Acquisition

This quantifies the expense to generate marketing campaigns that result in new customer conversions—a useful factor in determining how much your brand spends to acquire new customers, and identifying areas along the flywheel requiring improvements.

Average Order Value (AOV)

This metric measures the average amount of money spent by customers who place an order with your brand. Understanding this KPI ultimately helps you modify your marketing approach and product pricing strategy for maximum effect.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Calculate your ROI by measuring your net profit, minus your marketing costs, divided by your marketing costs. This is one of the most important metrics in ascertaining your overall strategy’s success by gauging the profit or losses.

Most Reliable Methods of Tracking Direct Mail Campaigns

Unlike the real-time analytics provided from email and other aspects of digital marketing campaigns, gauging the impact of your direct mail campaigns requires you to assess response rates from the materials you physically send to your audience.

To measure your campaigns’ performance, you’ll have to monitor audience engagement with your various CTAs.

Here are some of the best ways to measure your direct mail effectiveness:

QR Codes

Incorporating QR (quick response) codes in your direct mailers helps your audience more easily engage and interact with your brand’s website and content. Users simply scan the machine-readable code from their smartphones or mobile devices, and are instantly redirected to the relevant web page, CTA, or product offer.

To track your QR code response rate, lead users to a customized landing page, and monitor the associated analytics to see how many people visited. This can provide important information about your direct mail audience, including location, time and date of scanning, device used, and how they engaged.

Campaign-Specific URLs

Include a personalized, campaign-specific URL that directs users to a unique, relevant landing page with content, information, and offers designed to appeal to their medical specialties, interests, and stages along the buyer’s journey. The number of visitors entering via this unique URL is a great indication of your direct mail campaign’s impact.

Custom Phone Numbers

Including a special, trackable phone number unique to your mailers is another convenient way of measuring your direct mail response rates.

Utilize a unique, dedicated, toll-free number that directs callers to your official business line, and track the responses to gauge how many callers were direct mail recipients.

Similar to URL tracking, utilizing a campaign-specific phone number enables you to monitor response rates and discover just how effective your mailers are at stimulating positive engagement.

Redeemable Coupon Codes

Providing trackable custom coupon codes on mailers incentivizes your direct mail recipients to interact with your brand, and enables you to quantify how many were used.

Make your coupon codes redeemable over the phone, on your website, and in person, and be sure to track responses across your numerous platforms.

Audience Surveys

An oftentimes overlooked method of gauging direct mail effectiveness is posing a survey or questionnaire asking customers and prospects how they found you. HCPs are generally incredibly busy, so be sure to make it as convenient as possible for your healthcare audience to respond by incorporating these communications on your website, a relevant CTA, or immediately following a purchase.

Whether your direct mailers take the form of newsletters, brochures, catalogs, postcards, and sales letters, or use unique interactive elements, reliably tracking your campaign progress will help you better understand your audience while optimizing your overall strategy for maximum effectiveness.

PDQ Communications can help you deploy unique and memorable direct mail content to the optimal audience for your campaigns, using our highly targeted and well-segmented contact lists of qualified healthcare professionals from across the industry. We’ll craft the perfect messaging, utilize customized interactive elements, deploy, and monitor your campaign progress, to help you reach the right audience, at the right time, every time. Contact PDQ Communications today to find out what we can do for you.