4 Tips for Tracking Direct Mail Response Rates

Marketing measurement is an important step to understanding the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and how much business they bring in. The last thing you want to do is waste money on marketing approaches that aren’t beneficial for your business. Tracking the response rate of your campaigns ensures that you know if your marketing dollars are going to the right place.

When considering your direct mail campaigns, the “response rate” is a metric that measures how many potential customers contact you as a result of the postcards that you mail. If you aren’t measuring the response rate you are missing out on valuable information that will help you identify how to effectively use your marketing budget.

In order to understand the results of your direct mail, you need to track the response rate.

We’ve laid out 4 tips that you can use to help track response rates and optimize your marketing spend.

Tip #1: Track Website Traffic

No matter how a lead first hears about you, odds are they will check out your website before they call you. By monitoring website traffic, you can learn valuable information about the response rates of your marketing efforts. Basic website traffic tools, like Google Analytics, tell you if they typed your website directly into their browser, meaning they read it off an ad or postcard. You can also track referral websites, search terms, and more.

Below you'll find tips on how to use your website to track response rates.

Ask Your Visitor How They Heard About You

Add a “How did you find us?” question on your online form that includes options such as; Google Search, Got a Postcard, and Personal Referral. This is a simple step that you can take to get valuable feedback on what is working.

Install and Monitor Google Analytics

Google Analytics is easy to install and use. It provides a wealth of information about who is on your site, what they are doing, and what they are looking for. It can answer questions like, how soon after your postcard mailing did your traffic increase? Which pages are people visiting? How many people who come to the site end up filling out your form?

Use a Unique Landing Page

Create a page on your site and use a unique URL on your postcards or other advertising. The visitors that come to that page are those that saw the website URL on that specific marketing piece. You can use Google Analytics to track the traffic to this page in order to measure the interest and business that your postcard drove.

Tip #2: Always Ask Your Customer What Made them Call

Your sales team should have a plan for tracking each phone call.

When a potential customer calls, your salesperson can ask them a couple of simple questions about why they are calling. A common way to do this is to ask, “How did you find us?” This is a good start but doesn’t always lead to the correct answer.

We recommend that your sales team ask these two questions.

1st Question - “How did you find our phone number today?”

Be prepared for the caller to respond, “From your website”. (Note: We find that customers that have received your postcard will go to your website before they call.) "From your website" is a very typical, and possibly misleading response because the original source could be a referral or postcard. The follow-up question should be:

2nd Question - “What led you to our website?

This will often reveal the real source of the lead.  Potential answers include:

• Google Search
• Saw it on a postcard
• Saw an advertisement
• A recommendation from my real estate agent or friend

By adding the answers to these questions into an excel spreadsheet or CRM system, you can start tracking which marketing efforts are driving traffic to your site and ultimately the source of the call.

Tip #3: Use one standard tool to track all of your response rates.

Tracking all marketing campaigns in one tool is the best way to compare what works. At a glance, you can see how many leads came from each campaign.

CRM systems, or “customer relationship management systems”, are used to house all of the information about your clients—including their marketing source and sales history. You can find free or inexpensive CRM options online. A couple of recommendations are Hubspot CRM, FreshSales, and Zoho. MovingsLeads.com will send you a weekly excel spreadsheet that can be imported into your CRM system.

Or just use an excel spreadsheet or shared Google Spreadsheet! Simply add a column for “Marketing Source” and you, your sales team, or whoever answers the phone can mark the source of each call.

Tip #4: Deliver a Strong “Call-to-Action”

By including an enticing Call-to-Action (CTA)  to claim a special offer on your postcards, you can increase response rates. Including a compelling offer like, “Call us for a Free Estimate”  will make your postcard memorable and the homeowner is more likely to mention it when they call. The use of a unique offer becomes a great way to track response.

Here are three tips for creating a Call-to-Action with an offer and tracking the success.

1. Include an action phrase. “Call us!”
2. Make the offer unique and compelling. We often suggest using a free estimate as an initial offer. Free estimates give homeowners an immediate value that isn’t dependent on them making a purchase.
3. Add a code that they need to reference in order to redeem the offer. When they mention the offer and the code you’ll be able to track how the homeowner found you.

You can offer additional offers after being hired like free boxes or discounts. If you are offering a discount, make sure you are abiding by state laws on what can be offered to the homeowner.

Consider having different offers for different marketing campaigns. The CTA on your Google ad should be different than the CTA on your postcard. The key is to use it to track the initial source of each call. We recommend using a free estimate. It’s a clear offer, that’s easy to redeem, and it doesn’t require much coordination to fulfill.

Know Where Your Jobs are Coming From

If you’re spending money on marketing, you should know how well it’s supporting your business. At Movingleads.com, we are committed to our customer’s success.

Take it from one of our customers.....

“We like MovingLeads.com so much. We tell everyone they should be using their service! We have had great success and have seen a steady increase over the years of moves booked from these leads.”  V. Hardwick, CA

By using postcards and tracking responses, you’ll KNOW that you are booking more moves because of postcards.

Are you ready to get started? Signing up for our automated postcard program is easy and takes only a couple minutes. Call us at (303) 443-0767.