[This is a transcription from the Clickx Marketing Hack of the Day video series.]
Direct Mail Is Still Alive & Well
I am Solomon Thimothy with Clickx, for today’s Marketing Hack of the Day, I want to talk about direct mail conversion tracking. Direct mail is still alive and well, a lot of industries still use it. They’re getting very good ROI from it and whether it’s in the B2B sector or it’s B2C, I’ve seen great metrics and results that were generated from direct mail.
So, if any of you are using direct mail, I’m going to give you some tips on how you can measure, track, and improve your ROI.
My hope is that at the end of this, you’ll get some insights into tracking your direct mail effectiveness and be able to improve it over time.
Add A Unique Call Tracking Number
First off, you want to include a call tracking number and that’s really the point here, is to use outbound strategy to really generate a phone call, like an inbound phone call, that you can then route that to anywhere you want, whether it’s going to your sales department or to a call center. So right off the bat, if your postcard looks something like this… You’re able to put all of your messaging everywhere and put your URL that you want your direct mail campaign leads to go to and have a unique phone number. This unique phone number allows you to track how many calls are coming in. You can really understand the number of phone calls, whether it’s 10 phone calls you generated or 100 phone calls, you wouldn’t have that in for insight if it goes to your regular phone line that you have for your business. Secondly, you’re able to record every single one of those interactions that they’re having with your brand to understand the quality of the call, the quality of the lead, and the quality of the conversation. So it’s really important that you can listen to those and improve the actual experience that customers are having when they dial in from a direct mail campaign.
Route Calls Using IVR
Another real cool feature is IVR, or interactive voice response, being able to route the calls to different locations depending on whether it’s after hours or not, depending on west coast or east coast, however you divide up your territory, you’re able to route which calls go where. I think it’s really important that as you scale up, your direct mail efforts, to really to figure out how do you want to best route it so that they can get answered as quickly as possible.
Implement A Repeatable Phone Recording
Finally, if you wanted to actually include some sort of recording, the moment they dial that number, you can have a recording so that you can hear the message. The customer can understand, “Okay, this is going to get answered in a minute and it’s getting routed to such and such department.” It’s really important that you let the consumer know that their calls are really important. Also, it’s important that you have a system in place that plays the same message over and over and over.
There are so many benefits to having call tracking. It surprised me how many people still don’t implement call tracking on direct mail campaigns.
Measure What It Costs To Get A Good Lead
Some things that I want to really want to emphasize is on measuring cost per phone calls. You need to understand what it costs to generate one new lead and one new phone call.
I think it’s really important that marketers go backwards and really understand, “Okay, do I send a thousand postcards? I get one phone call from a thousand postcards. So if I do 10,000 postcards, that should be able to generate 10 phone calls.” That’s just a hypothetical number. Now, every call doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good lead, so you want to measure what it costs to get a good lead, so that you can put them further down in the funnel. You need to understand total cost. Maybe it’s a hundred thousand dollars, you generated a hundred phone calls, so how many of them are actually a good lead?
What I’m really getting at, is to let the marketer understand what does it cost to generate one new net customer, that’s the number everybody’s after. It’s really hard to do that when you don’t have call tracking or when you don’t have a really good system in place. You have no idea how it’s getting deployed, who’s entering the phone call, and who’s keeping tabs of it.
Test, Test, Test The Effectiveness Of Your Messaging
In our case, what we’ve done is we’ve implemented call tracking for all of marketing; digital marketing and offline tracking. With our dashboard, Clickx, we have the ability to track the calls, depending on the day that it came, the caller ID is there, and even call recording is there. You can actually do the routing to wherever you would like to. It allows marketers to understand where the calls are coming from. Is it offline? Is it online? Is it from SEO? Is it from paid search? Is it from social media? Is it from local? All these metrics have to be measured if you don’t have some sort of an offline tracking, just like you would have an online conversion tracking, it’s really impossible to understand the cost of a lead, the cost of a phone call, and the cost of a new customers.
If you’re a marketer and you’re already implementing call tracking, I want to leave you with one last extremely high quality tip.
Really measure your messaging. You have to know the effectiveness of messaging depending on what it is that you’re offering. In my case, I have two different offers here. One is Messaging A and one is Messaging B, you can test to a different target, you can try two different personas, and see which one is improving it. You can do west coast versus east coast, like I said earlier, so you want to be continually testing, that’s the really key here. It’s to test, test, test!
Really understand what’s working and how many calls are being generated, what’s your costing to get those calls and those leads, and what is it really going to take to to generate one new customer. If you can figure that out, then you would have all sorts of ideas on how you can test, improve, and refine.
As always, if you have any questions, leave it in the comment box! Thanks again for watching another edition of Marketing Hack of the Day.
