The digital age makes it increasingly easy for marketers to track and record the success of online marketing campaigns. There are a variety of tracking tools available that encourage the use of digital advertising and inbound marketing strategies. However, even with the growing use of digital advertising, you might be surprised that print marketing has actually hit its stride. Small businesses, in particular, use print marketing to reach local communities and target audiences through specialty publications.
Print materials are important components for every type of direct-mail campaign. Print marketing offers a fresh and cost-effective way to advertise and increase awareness of your business. While visits and conversions are easy to track with digital marketing methods, some marketers may struggle when measuring ROI for print ads.
Begin With Measuring Your Response Rate
In order to successfully track your response rate, you need to decide on a defining action. What action do you want your target audience to take after they view your print marketing? Should they call you, visit your website, buy a specific product? Your audience won’t know what it is they are supposed to do unless you tell them. Once you decide what your goal is, create a clear call-to-action for your print materials such as “Call now.”
Provide a unique number for recipients of that print marketing piece to call, and you will be able to accurately measure the number of actions tied to that particular campaign. Your basic metric will be the response rate. Best practices dictate that you should separate out each campaign in your CRM, allowing you to compare performance across different print materials. Because it is important to measure results of any marketing activity, here are five techniques for determining your ROI in print.
Create Unique Landing Pages
Instead of directing print marketing recipients to your general homepage, create a unique landing page for them. This is a cost-effective way of tracking your response rates and allows you to use web analytics to measure ROI traffic, conversion rates, customer data, and more. Make sure to use unique subdomains or landing pages for each campaign. You could even go a step further and create unique landing pages not only for different campaigns but different target groups within those campaigns.
By leveraging all of those different landing pages, you can learn where your response rate is the highest and where your print marketing is the most effective. In follow-up campaigns, you will have a better idea of who your most responsive and valuable customers are, and focus on them to further increase your ROI.
Coupons and Vouchers
Customers love getting a discount, freebie, or any other offer. A printed flyer is a perfect opportunity to provide customers with a coupon or voucher. Simply send a personalized letter to your target audience with the flyer, and offer, attached to it. You can track engagement rates using coupon codes. One thing to remember when you use discount rates, discounts only work when the perceived value is greater than the effort your target customer has to make.
QR Codes
QR codes are particularly well-suited for posters and flyers. Items that a customer will walk past and notice, but something they won’t necessarily be taking with them. They work best at places where your key audience is going to see them, such as at conferences, seminars, and trade shows. You can set a QR code to do a variety of actions when it is scanned. You could have your QR code open a website, open a social media page, send an email, or make a phone call. Track responses to QR codes using a URL referrer, email address, or extension number
Ask Your Customers
Direct and to the point, this method is quite useful, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses, though it can often reveal surprising insights for businesses of all sizes. Plus, asking your customers directly, “how did you hear about us,” can’t do any harm. A customer calling in won’t mind answering an additional question or two. This method isn’t only for phone calls, consider incorporating the question into your website funnel as a simple optional drop-down selection. It is important to note that this question should remain short and concise. A longer questionnaire is better reserved for a post-sale follow-up.
Track Improvements
Maybe the oldest method of measuring the response rates of print campaigns is to look for improvements in the period after you launched them. Ask yourself, “are there significantly more sales, new customers, or leads? Has there been a jump in subscribers to your mailing list? Did organic traffic to your website increase?” While correlation isn’t always causation, you can draw some reasonable conclusions as to the effectiveness of your print campaigns by monitoring some key metrics.
At Safeguard Premier Branding Solutions we know that measuring return on investment is an important aspect of doing good business. The key to measuring ROI from a printed marketing campaign is taking the time to plan your campaign from start to finish. From the layout and design to fast printing, Safeguard Premier Branding Solutions is your resource for printing and marketing solutions. Give us a call to discuss your next print marketing project!