1-844-222-4769
One of the digital age’s great promises is more accurate tracking of marketing’s effectiveness. This problem has long perplexed businesses, advertisers, and marketers.
Tracking Postcard Campaigns to Grow Your Bottom Line
This isn’t difficult anymore, particularly for digital marketing channels. Easy-to-use software makes it simple to track digital campaigns. You can pinpoint how many conversions, calls, visits, opens, and transactions that emails, webpages, search campaigns, and social posts generate.
But what about more “traditional” forms of marketing and channels of communication? The reality is that you should hold postcards to the same standards as digital. Especially when it comes to tracking marketing attribution and ROI. Luckily, tracking postcard campaigns is easier than you might think. Unfortunately, the majority of businesses blindly spend money — without knowing the return of investment (ROI) of marketing spend.
If you run marketing campaigns, you really should be tracking their effectiveness. How do you test for what’s working and what isn’t? How do you know you’re not wasting your money on an ineffective campaign?
Fortunately, it’s never been easier to track postcard campaign responses from your marketing spend.
The arrival of cloud-based point-of-sales makes it easier for businesses to connect marketing campaigns. By doing so, you can cross-reference individual transactions to see exactly how much revenue is generated.
At GrowMail, we’re obsessively committed to lowering marketers’ customer acquisition costs. That’s why we include two solutions in every marketing campaign: call tracking and landing pages.
These tools enable any marketer to track postcard campaigns. Measure results to test conversion rates of ad creative and every call-to-action. This data empowers you to hold us or any marketing vendor accountable for results.
If you don’t use these tools today, you’re almost certainly losing money on your marketing campaigns.
Call Tracking for Postcard Campaigns
Imagine, for a second, that one of your prospects receives one of your postcard mailings. She’s interested in your services. She calls your business number, which you’ve helpfully included on the postcard.
You’ve earned a lead as a direct result of your direct mail marketing campaign. But how would you know that?
You could ask your customers. Of course, not everyone will answer, or even remember. If a whole team is fielding calls, they won’t always ask that question, no matter how thorough they are.
In fact, you may conclude that you’re not getting enough leads from your postcard campaign. Or worse, that you have no way of knowing. You may even decide to end your postcard campaign — which, in this case, would be a terrible mistake.
But with call tracking, you can avoid this uncertainty.
It’s simple — you use a different phone number for every campaign, mailing, or ad you put out. Call tracking services like CallRail, Convirza, and CallFire make this easy to do.
Throughout the campaign, you check which phone numbers receive the most calls — and therefore, which campaigns or mailings work best.
Call Tracking, Text Messaging, Landing Pages, and all reporting are included in every campaign run by Grow Mail. We do this so that our marketers see the ROI from their campaigns.
GrowMail’s Reporting Dashboard is included in every campaign that we run. It tracks phone calls and text messages sent to your business. You can even listen to call recordings, rate lead quality, and record how much customers spend.
This empowers you to generate a clear ROI, fine-tune your marketing, and increase the bottom line.
Tracking Campaigns with Landing Pages
Most companies today have a website, right? It likely has multiple pages and links to everything to know about the business. Of course, there is so much content that is likely unrelated to a marketing campaign’s call-to-action.
Too much information creates anxiety for a consumer, which is likely to hurt conversion rates. (That’s marketing-speak for “sales” or “lead generation,” depending on your objective.)
Landing pages, though, are laser-focused on simply converting a visitor into a lead or customer. You can think of a landing page as the online equivalent to call tracking.
Unlike a homepage, “About Us” page, or a product page on your ecommerce platform, we tailor landing pages to a specific campaign. Unlike your other pages, which have a broader focus, landing pages are much more focused and specific. They’re written for one audience.
They promise one thing. They contain one offer. Most importantly, they’re tied to one campaign.
If you direct people to a website as part of your call-to-action in your campaigns, it’s harder to track. You really should direct them to a landing page instead of a home page. Otherwise, you don’t know the true source of your traffic or revenue.
However, the main reason is that the landing page is the next destination in your prospect’s, “buyer’s journey.” If the offer in your postcard mailing intrigued them enough to type the landing page URL, great. Your landing page — specifically speaking to their needs — will convince them to buy. This is how you “convert” a lead to a customer.
For example, take a look at the difference between Wix’s Website and one of their landing pages for their marketing campaigns.
The other — and just as important — reason to use landing pages is much like call tracking. You can track your postcard campaign’s effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).
Just like call tracking, you use a different landing page for each campaign, mailing, or ad (or at least different URLs). In doing so, you can measure precisely which mailings, ads, or other marketing efforts are generating the most visits, leads, and conversions (purchases).
“Tracking our postcard campaigns with landing pages took our marketing to the next level. We finally see how much revenue our marketing dollars really generate.” —James, Chief Marketing Officer
Too often, we see small and medium-sized businesses run marketing campaigns and simply link to their website. This makes them unable to track which customers came from a specific campaign.
If you’re doing this, you could be underestimating the performance of your postcard campaign. Or worse, spending too much on creative or messaging that isn’t delivering a response.
Here’s another tip: when creating a landing page, use a URL that’s easy to type and relates to your promotion.
For example, let’s say you’re offering a free trial of your product and your main site is http://yourbusiness.com. The landing page URL should be something likehttp://yourbusiness.com/freetrial or http://yourbusiness.com/postcard.
We include landing pages that are tracked in GrowMail’s Reporting Dashboard. This empowers you to track postcard campaigns, examine the results, and grow your ROI.
Bringing Your Campaign All Together
If your marketing campaigns don’t earn you a return on the cash you’ve invested ask yourself, why? If you’re not tracking postcard campaigns, you’re probably not even able to answer this.
You leave money on the table and essentially flush your marketing dollars down the drain without tracking.
In sum, knowing how well your marketing performs is critical to growing your business. You should be tweaking or scrapping what isn’t working and doing more of what is working. You’ll attract more prospects, more leads, and ultimately more customers.
And just because you use a so-called “traditional” marketing channel like direct mail doesn’t mean you can’t use technology to track performance. You can do so just as precisely and effectively as you would with a digital marketing channel.
Tracking postcard performance also provides GrowMail’s team with the necessary data to improve results. We do so by testing and improving upon each campaign. We’re driven by continuous learning, research, and metrics to drive sales and find new customers for less money. Call Tracking and Landing Pages enable us to see how different designs, geographies, and frequencies affect your campaign. In turn, we can ensure it is always getting better.
Finally, if your postcard marketing directs people to call or visit a website, you must use call tracking and landing pages to be successful. Don’t spend a single dollar more on marketing until you invest in a way to track response rates from promotions. That way, you can discover the most cost-effective media to drive new leads and customers. In turn, you will save money and grow the bottom line.