How Marketing Campaign Measurement Works, And How It Can Improve Your Return On Investment

You may have heard an old saying companies use to describe their marketing; “I know that 50% of my marketing works, I just don’t know which 50%.”

Crafting effective marketing strategies and striving to achieve the greatest return on investment (ROI) is an exercise as old as marketing itself. But where there used to be a great deal of guesswork, new digital tools have empowered marketers to track the success of their campaigns, while helping them to make informed decisions for the future. With softwares such as DRMG Insight your business has the ability to track the success of your direct mail and digital campaigns. Marketing managers are always weighing effort versus impact — ensuring that their time, money and resources are producing results.  Which means that they will ultimately have to answer the question, “How can I track the success of my campaign?”

Imagine, for example, you’re tasked with designing or running a campaign where the focus is obtaining leads.  A lead is an individual or organization who has an interest in your business— they’re interested in buying what you are selling.  Understanding where your leads come from can help you focus your dollars and efforts towards the right types of campaigns to grow their revenue. That’s why tracking campaign performance and campaign tracking tools, such as DRMG Insight can be so powerful.

We believe that measurement is the key to not only prove the value of your direct mail and digital campaigns but also for optimizing how your marketing dollars are spent to achieve the greatest ROI.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are sometimes an overused buzzword in the business marketing world — an afterthought attached to the bottom of a campaign brief. However, they can and should be powerful tools which enable meaningful growth for your business. When you establish the right KPIs for your campaign, you can clearly see what works, what doesn’t and how to spend your dollars most efficiently moving forward.

But perhaps more important than what businesses stand to gain through campaign tracking is what they stand to lose. Not tracking your campaign results can lead to underestimating response by as much as 50%. Any marketer knows that is an indicator for a massive shortfall in sales. You can also miss valuable insights regarding your sales funnel, such as where your leads are coming from, which parts of your sales funnel may require improvement. Just as tracking campaigns help you understand the value of a campaign, not tracking creates blinds spots, making you unaware of just which half of your marketing is working, and which isn’t.

What Insights Can You Obtain From Campaign Tracking?

Campaign tracking offers a wide variety of insights to help you better understand and optimize your campaign in real-time.

Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution

A common concern that businesses with multiple marketing channels and campaigns have is understanding how each of those campaigns talks to each other. Often, marketers want to integrate direct mail campaigns into overall campaigns, for example. By connecting your campaign data from Google Analytics & MailChimp to software like DRMG Insight, users can view where their campaigns overlap.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on Investment is often seen as the most important performance metric which to gauge the success of a campaign by. Campaign tracking not only measures the sales revenue a campaign brings in on every dollar spent, but can also measure the quality of sales leads a campaign generates, as well as overall revenue.

Lead Quality 

The number of calls and form submissions you receive monthly from each campaign will ultimately illustrate how successful your advertisement was. Once you understand the volume, you can categorize your leads by rating them to reflect their qualification to buy from you.

If your leads are consistently of low qualification, then you know it’s time to make adjustments to your campaign. It’s always a tough call but not nearly as troublesome as continuing to burn dollars unnecessarily.

Conversion Rate 

Moving further down the sales funnel, conversion rate will help you measure how many individuals interacted with your campaign and converted into a lead or customer. This enables your business to gain insights on the effectiveness of the chosen marketing channels and platforms.

Cost per Lead

Cost per lead measures the cost-effectiveness of your actual marketing campaigns. This helps marketers drill down into aspects such as campaign creative to gain insights on its overall effectiveness at driving leads. 

Cost per Win

Digging deeper into ROI, cost per win means to measure the expense of each sale. Since campaign tracking software captures data in real-time and through every interaction, it’s possible to gain insight into the efficiency and profitability of each sale.

Customer Lifetime Value

Campaign tracking software allows organizations to measure the lifetime value of their customers by tracking the “average sale per customer” multiplied by “average number of times a customer buys per year” multiplied by “average retention time in years for a typical customer.” Of course, this takes time to compile, however, it allows marketers to identify their best customers and make strategic decisions about retention and onboarding efforts.

How Do You Track Campaign Performance?

Call tracking is one such method to tracking campaign performance. With call tracking software, responses to your advertising efforts are captured in real-time. Phone calls and website form submissions are recorded so you know exactly who responded to which ads and when. Users can create trackable phone numbers for any campaign, as well as collect and report on leads from any campaign. DRMG Insight also automatically organizes all lead contact information.

Another method is to utilize UTM parameters. A UTM parameter is an additional component added to a website URL. This unique component allows marketers to identify which specific campaign is referring traffic to a website. The parameters can be read by campaign tracking tools to understand how fruitful a piece of creative from your campaign has been.

QR codes allow for offline interactions to translate into online interaction, by enabling users to scan the code with their phone, which in turn opens a unique URL that can be tracked by campaign monitoring software.  You can learn more about QR codes and how they are tracked here.

Can I Integrate Direct Mail Into My Overall Campaign?

Further bridging the gap between online and offline,  DRMG Insight also enables users to integrate their direct mail insights into an overall campaign. Users can connect DRMG Insight to Google Analytics and MailChimp to see how your ads are impacting other channels. This allows users to track individual ads and media on the same chart, see the effect of the media on leads and website traffic as well as export leads to any CRM with a simple CSV export tool. Learn more about DRMG Insight.

What Is Campaign Tracking Used For?

In a way, that’s up to you. The intention of campaign measurement is to empower marketers by enabling them to make informed decisions and spend their dollars and time efficiently. 

Understanding Lead Insights

Each month, you can collect important key performance metrics for your direct Mail and digital campaigns. These metrics can include how many phone calls you received, the average duration and even what day and hour were your top performers will help you identify which leads are quality. As an example, take your investment in direct mail or digital marketing with DRMG, and divide that number by the total number of inquiries you received.

From there, you can determine how many inquiries turned into customers, and over time, how valuable each customer is. By using software such as DRMG Insight, you can take a deeper dive into each phone call and new prospect. The DRMG Insights Prospects Page allows you to look at your prospects by source or campaign, and gain insights by reviewing all collected data – including listening to calls from call tracking campaigns. 

If you missed a call, choosing a platform that captures historical data of the call, like DRMG Insight, will allow you to follow up on it later. For example, in the DRMG Insight dashboard, we allow you to see at a glance where your leads are coming from and the volume which is being captured over the last 30 days. Of course, you can dig deeper into those insights, but it’s just one way you can decide where to spend your time and efforts in generating sales.

Optimizing ROI

Campaign tracking tools allow you to quickly and effectively communicate the value of a direct mail campaign or digital campaign through tracked performance metrics. Analyzing your ROI or your ‘cost per lead’, for example, can help build a strong case for the continued value of a direct mail or digital campaign, as well as provide strategic areas for optimization. Each month you’ll have the opportunity to compare your ROI to the previous months and work together with the DRMG team to continue to increase your ROI. Examine what’s changed over time, what’s been more effective and what hasn’t been. You may decide to alter creative or modify your channel strategy in turn. 

We encourage customers to track the performance of both digital as well as offline campaigns, such as direct mail campaigns through DRMG Insight. DRMG Insight is an advertising analytics tool that allows businesses to monitor and measure the effectiveness of online and offline marketing efforts in a centralized location by tracking calls, capturing form fills and connecting APIs. In short, DRMG Insight helps tell the story of an integrated marketing campaign. That’s a story you can use to demonstrate the value of your current direct mail campaign and plan for even more efficient future campaigns. DRMG Insight enables users to monitor performance metrics that highlight ad impact, as well as conversions from advertising efforts. We also keep it simple for users to set up print & digital campaigns, so you can track the metrics that matter most for you. Campaign measurement is the foundation of making strategic decisions to improve your business outcomes. Learn more about how to analyze analytics within our Campaign tracking software.