Print allows you to get into the hands and homes of new and current clients giving them a welcomed break from all the social media and digital marketing they see every day. But before you send out that mailer make sure you are prepared to measure the results of your campaign.

Sales

The most obvious way to measure how effective your results are is to measure your new sales or an increase in sales.  However, sometimes this is easier said than done.  You still need to make sure you have proper tracking in place to determine where these sales originated from.  Perhaps it’s as simple as asking customers how they heard about you…however, even that has its flaws as you are relying on the customer remembering how or where they heard about you and relaying that information back accurately.

New Leads

Similarly to sales, new leads are a great method to use to measure your print marketing results.  But also like sales, they can be difficult to determine where they come from.  Perhaps you get people that call or come in to your business, these can all be categorized as leads.  There are a few questions that come into play here.  1. Again, how do you know where they came from? And 2. How to do you capture these leads?  They won’t be very valuable to you going forward if you do not collect some sort of information from them.  Make sure to capture and record information from these leads so you have way to continue to communicate with them going forward.

New customers/leads in your database

Depending on your industry and type of leads, you may have several different types of databases which you use to collect customer information and communicate with them on an ongoing basis.  This is important to maintain as part of your marketing efforts.  If you can stay in front of people and be top of mind, your chances of converting those leads to customers goes up.  This may include an email database, having someone follow or like you on your social media, or collecting their address or phone number for direct mail or telemarketing.  If you can determine what percentage of your database you convert to a customer after sending marketing communications, you can calculate what a new lead in your database is worth to you.  This will help you budget your marketing efforts.  For example, say a hotel chain determined that each time they sent out marketing communications to 100,000 people they had about 200 people book a stay for an average of $500 for their total stay. Since 200 x $500 = $100,000 they can determine that each lead is worth $1.  When they run future marketing campaigns, as long as they bring in one lead for every $1 spent, they know they are getting a return on their investment.

Online calls-to-actions/analytics

One of the easiest ways to track your efforts are by directing people to a web page, social media site, or personalized URL online.  Not only are people more likely to do one of these things as opposed to calling or coming in to your business, in most cases you have access to instant analytics to track your efforts.  In addition to being able to track visits, you can add a step to collect lead information that will allow you to enter them to your database.  Another way to direct people to an online call-to-action is by using QR Codes.

It’s important to remember that print marketing or any marketing for that matter, holds more value than just the numbers. Print marketing puts you name on your customers mind even if they are not buying at the time. Materials that catch the attention of a potential customer as something that may be of value to them later are often held on to. And remember more than one touch is often needed to get your message across. So make sure you have a well thought out plan before embarking on any campaign