Every marketing channel in a campaign has to justify its spend, it’s also vital you can see what’s working and what’s not so that you can continuously evolve and optimise your activity to boost ROI. In this blog, we’ll discuss some of the lesser-considered tactics used to track and report the success of direct marketing.
A/B testing
In over 25 years of offline marketing, we have learned the most critical tactic to ensuring continued success and improvement in all of your offline marketing is A/B testing. Test different formats, designs, offers, in fact, test everything you can. Testing is the only way to see for yourself what works for your brand and what doesn’t. You should build A/B testing into every marketing campaign at the planning stage. Avoid testing too much at once; pick one element to test and then run two versions of each. By including a test of a data segment, offer, CTA, format, send day you will learn what your customers prefer and so you can continually optimise and improve with every campaign. If you learn on every campaign, it doesn’t take long to dramatically ramp up those response rates.
Spike reporting
Don’t short change your campaign – a Spike Report is how we demonstrate where sales are generated from a campaign when the customers haven’t used an offer code, the ‘hidden’ percentage but a very important one. Typically around 35% of people convert using the campaign offer codes, so our Spike Report is the only way to see the full ROI of your campaign.
To do a Spike report, first you need the control data. Control is the average number of orders received daily that come into the business through all of the current activity IE without the campaign running. Then lay the increase in sales during the campaign over the top of this to prove it is over and above what would normally come in. You just need your transaction data from two weeks before the campaign to two weeks after the campaign.
Code tracking
Code tracking is a big part of judging how successful your campaign has been. If you use one code on every piece, you can get a good view of what your campaign did by measuring how many people used that code. As mentioned above, keep in mind that codes may not be used even though the targeted person still bought something.
Generic codes can be copied and shared out, which can help extend the reach of your marketing campaign, especially useful for launching a new product, but getting a clear picture to optimise can be trickier. Unique codes are codes that are assigned to each specific person or household in a dataset. This way you can see which person redeemed the code, which gives a better representation of which variables are working, especially if you have a lot of variables in your audiences. QR codes are another super effective thing to implement, they make it really easy to track the response rate to your campaign, and help integrate your offline and online channels seamlessly.
Average order value.
Make sure you’re tracking the average order value of conversions from your campaign. Why? Because this gives you a good idea of the marginal gains from increasing your activity, and helps predict ROI. You can also overlay this onto other data and see if there are any correlations between other variables and the spend, helping you to optimise future activity.
Lifetime order value.
While this is difficult to always calculate, having a rough idea is extremely useful. Lifetime order value is especially relevant for direct mail, because it is often used by subscription brands such as HelloFresh or Pact Coffee. When you factor in that a new customer brings more value long-term than their initial campaign response, it can help create a richer picture fo the real ROI of your campaign.
Try our free ROI calculator
We’ve been doing this for over 25 years, and in that time we’ve built up a wealth of knowledge and experience. This knowledge and experience has allowed us to create an ROI calculator for offline marketing. So go on, have a nose and see the type of results that offline marketing with PSE could deliver for you.
