contact us     help    login  

Measurement & Tracking: An Essential Aspect of Marketing

It is important to include a means of tracking and measuring marketing campaign results. Postage paid Business Reply Cards (BRCs) or envelopes, coupons, or discount codes are often used in printed direct mail campaigns, but these require the recipient to manually communicate back to the marketer or sales rep, as well as a manual process for tracking the response. This can limit the response and the ability to accurately track the results of the campaign.

Luckily, there are now more efficient, immediate, and accurate ways of measuring not just responses, but overall results of the campaign. Both e-mail and PURLs (Personalized URLs) provide a more interactive approach to establishing that all-important dialog with the recipient. However the tracking mechanism is designed, it should provide an easy way to measure how many recipients responded, who they are, what offer they responded to, and what actions they took. In conventional direct marketing, there are many actions a recipient can take that are not traceable. If provided a personalized URL, the recipient is more likely to visit the resulting Web microsite either to gain more information or simply out of curiosity. This offers the marketer one more opportunity to interact, gaining and conveying information, and keeping the dialog going.
As an added benefit, by incorporating the Web in this way, the marketer can have access to real-time data as the campaign progresses, along with a more accurate measurement of the results. Conducting a campaign in waves also provides the marketer with the ability to assess the effectiveness of individual offers, creative, and communications mechanisms that can then be refined to deliver even better results over time.

As your journey begins from a print service provider to a marketing services provider, it is more likely for you to be increasingly involved throughout the entire campaign, from initial discovery and strategy development, to development of the creative brief, execution and the measurement, and feedback stages. This is good for the company because it increases the value of the offerings across the entire marketing supply-chain and good for the customer, who can benefit from your company’s expertise and guidance from the very early stages of the project.

The preceding is an excerpt from a report entitled Entry-Level VDP. To learn more about this report, visit our online store or contact Robyn Wuori at ext. 103 or via e-mail at .