When
you invest in any marketing effort, you want to know if it’s working. There are
many approaches to results measurement, and the right choice for any marketing
campaign will depend on your marketing goals. For numerous marketers, response
rates are the first measurement they use. But there are other measures that are
more telling.
Let’s
look at three of them.
1. CPL (cost per lead). When you are developing a
mail campaign, it’s easy to focus on the price per piece. It’s hard for
personalized mailers to compete with high-volume static mail on a cost basis,
but everything changes when you look at what your program costs per lead.
If
you mail 100,000 postcards at $.25 each (including postage), that’s a project
cost of $25,000. If that campaign achieves a 1% response rate, that’s 250 leads
at the cost of $100 per lead. On the other hand, if you mail 25,000
personalized mailers at $1.00 each, that is still a project cost of $25,000.
However, if you achieve a 12% response rate, that’s 3,000 leads. Now your cost
per lead drops to $8.33!
2. CPS (cost per sale). Not all leads translate
into sales. To find out what it costs you to actually close a sale, divide the
number of people who make a purchase into your total costs. If only 33% of
respondents to the above campaign make a purchase, for example, your cost per
sale is $300 for the static campaign, while for the personalized campaign, it
is $25.00.
3. LCV (lifetime customer value). The value of the sale often
goes beyond the initial purchase. If personalized communications woo the buyer
of one automaker to another, and if that customer becomes loyal to that brand,
the return on investment from that mailing piece includes the value of every
car purchased by that customer over his or her lifetime. This is an important
metric for marketers of long-term purchases, such as automobiles, financial
products, and insurance.
The bottom line?
Before you measure your results in any print campaign, make sure you understand
all of the available measuring sticks, then use the one(s) that are the most
meaningful to you.Please give us a call at 440-946-0606
Or visit our website here for more information.
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