Direct Mail – Measuring Success

Direct Mail – Measuring Success

This article is Part 3 of a 3 part series.

How to Measure Your Direct Mail Successes

In our past two articles, we’ve discussed direct mail campaigns. We talked about why direct mail is still an effective tool to communicate with your audience, and techniques to make your direct mail campaigns effective. In this issue, we take direct mail campaigns one step further and discuss how to measure the success of your direct mail campaign.

You can objectively measure your direct mail campaign’s success. You don’t have to hire an outside firm to do this. The easiest way to evaluate your direct mail campaign, also the “quick and dirty” way, is to calculate your costs. You can calculate your costs per piece mailed, the cost per each lead obtained, or the cost for each new account opened.

I believe a more meaningful and accurate measurement is calculating the return on investment (ROI) from your campaign. Calculating a ROI uses your actual costs and compares those to your income projections from customers. For the most accurate ROI calculation, estimate the number of sales generated by a customer over an expected time, to calculate a “lifetime value” per customer.

There are no exact rules or guidelines that I am aware of which apply to direct mail campaign ROI calculations. That’s because the values used in your “lifetime value” calculations will vary. Your values will depend on your product, industry, target market and other factors unique to your business.

I believe the ultimate test of your direct mail campaign’s success is deciding if your prospective customers will spend enough money to justify your campaign’s expense. Will your campaign produce a positive outcome? If you can answer yes, and justify your campaign’s expense, then you’ve created a successful campaign.