Analysing the response to your campaigns can be one of the trickier elements of marketing. Whether it be direct mail, advertising or digital campaigns keeping track of your return on investment can help plan future projects more efficiently.
Whilst a direct link between your pieces and sales may be what you’re looking for, there’s more to advertising than this. Initially we need to evaluate if the product or service you offer is one of immediate purchase. To expand on this, a car showroom shouldn’t expect an instant flurry of response as most individuals don’t go buying cars on a monthly basis. In these instances, we use marketing to increase brand awareness so that when the time comes, your business is front of mind.
In addition to this, it’s worth pointing out that 6 months down the line, a prospect may not remember where they’ve seen your name, so don’t drop specific marketing channels because nobody mentions them directly.
Whilst, this is all well and good for longer lifespan products and services, some of you may well have the here and now fix, so let’s look at some techniques we can apply to measure our response.
- Physical Coupons
Coupons are one of the oldest tricks in the book. They can be applied largely to print materials (see coupon codes for digital), in either solid or perforated formats. This allows you to simply count up how many coupons have been redeemed to measure response rate at a glance. The only downside? This method requires you to offer a discount or benefit of sorts. After all, as a buyer, why use a coupon that holds no benefit to me.
- Coupon Codes
The digital equivalent of physical coupons (although they can be applied to print products). Comes with the same issue of requiring benefits (e.g discounts or freebies), but has the added advantage of automated counting to give you instant response rates.
- Variable U.R.L’s
The purpose of variable URL’s is that specific prospects get individual web addresses, personalised to them. For example, an email campaign can be sent through to an individual with links directed at the domain www.yourbusiness.com/firstname-lastname. This not only allows us to see how many times a page has been visited, but also allows us to pinpoint specific persons of interest for additional/future campaigns.
- QR Codes
A format of mixed opinion. However, most QR code generators can provide a dynamic service. This allows us to change the page redirect for single codes in order to provide valuable analytics and measure response.
- Landing Page
A more simple method, applicable to both print and digital media is landing pages. By setting up a dedicated micro-site for additional information, not only can we optimise content in mailings, but also track those who are interested in finding out more.
- Footfall
A less effective way to monitor response, is through footfall. Tracking volume of customers or visitors on a daily basis is a laborious task but can give you some insight into marketing effectiveness.
- Contact
In a similar way to footfall, tracking call and email numbers can also give you an insight. The same can be said about visits to your website through Google analytics. All of which are relative as not directly linked to your marketing, but its worth tracking.
Of course sales can be used as one channel to measure although as we mentioned, direct results are ultimately uncountable.
Track what you can, keep all channels open and never underestimate the power of brand awareness.