It’s time to get more strategic about your postcard marketing campaigns.

After reading that, you might be asking yourself, “I’m targeting the right people, I’m using call-to-action offers with expirations, I’m sending them multiple times and now you’re telling me to get more strategic?  What’s left?”

It’s quite simple, actually: you start tracking your results.

If you’re like most business owners, you think that you’re tracking your results, but in reality, the likelihood is that your efforts are falling a little short.  Unfortunately, most so-called “tracking” we hear about, isn’t really tracking at all.

Here’s a good example: you send out 1,000 postcards, receive 18 enquiries and calculate a 1.8% response rate.  But is that truly an accurate assessment? How do you know that all 18 enquiries are a direct result of your postcard mailing?  Would you have received some of those enquiries regardless of whether you had sent out your postcard mailing?

Tracking your postcard marketing results is as essential as anything you do. After all, postcard marketing campaigns can be extremely effective – but aren’t free (obviously) – which is why you need to keep your thumb on the pulse of your campaigns if you want to see the biggest return on your investment.

If you are accurately tracking your results, that’s great.

If you’re not, that doesn’t mean you should stop postcard marketing… but what it DOES mean is that you need to change what you’re doing ASAP. Here’s how:

1. Define – in advance – what success will be
   Define what you want prospects to do. Visit your website? Call you? Come into the office? Buy something? You can’t know whether a campaign is a success or a failure unless you know in advance what success and failure looks like. How are you going to write the call-to-action (CTA) if you don’t know what you want recipients to do?
2. Have a way to identify responses
   You need to be able to tell which enquiries came from your postcards and which came from some other sources, so have a special 800 number and/or URL that’s just for responses to the CTA on your postcard.
3. Do A/B Mailings
   Whether you’re sending 100 cards or 100,000, don’t make them all the same. Have at least two designs – more, if you’re mailing to a large number – with different messages and different CTAs tied to different response identifiers. Be steadfast in using the designs that produce a good response and ruthless in weeding out those that don’t. It doesn’t matter if it was your son-in-law’s design – if it isn’t working, get rid of it.
4. Know how long it takes prospects in your market to respond
   If you’re new to postcard marketing, you may not know how quickly prospects will respond. In some markets, like restaurants, a business owner can send out postcards and have sales from them within two days. In more conservative markets like insurance, however, you might have to send three separate mailings before you start to see the first tentative feelers. Budget for those three separate mailings and don’t give up after the first send-out simply because you think it isn’t working. Also make sure to track which postcard generated the most responses. 1% for the first? 1.5% for the second? 8% for the third? That’s vital information and you need to have it.
5. Track all of the data, even if you think it’s insignificant
   Give this task to a staff member you know to be meticulous – not a corner-cutter. You want a record, ideally on a spreadsheet, of every single measurable item. Which postcard got the most website visits? Which CTA? How many of those visits led to an enquiry and how many enquiries to a sale? Which geographic areas responded best (and worst) to which cards? And when you have all of this data, examine it. Get other people to examine it, too. Brainstorm. What are the numbers telling you?

Need help tracking your postcard campaign? Contact us today at 877-222-6010 and we’ll be happy to work with you on your postcard marketing campaign every step of the way.