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Chapter Eight

Chapter Sections:

Results and Response An Intro to Tracking with Informed Delivery® The Details on Informed Delivery

Results and Response

You’ve created your mailpiece, built out a budget and put your piece in the mail—next, you should focus on getting a grasp on tracking and ROI. To make sure you’re getting a good return on investment, it’s important to test how well your campaign is doing.

This way, you can see what worked and what didn’t before your next one, and get an idea of what resonates most with your customers.

Measuring Success

To get the full picture, you’ll first have to figure out which key performance indicators (KPIs) to focus on. KPIs are measurable elements of your campaign that will help gauge its success.

To get you started, here are a few examples of KPIs:

Response rates
Response rates show just how many customers responded to your mailpiece, whether via QR Codes®, discounts, freebies or phone numbers.[1] By including these elements in your campaigns, you can get a better idea of how your customers like to interact.

Take a look at Figure 8.1 for some easy ways to track customer response through your mailpiece.

Figure 8.1

  • Ask them to go to a personalized URL (PURL), scan a QR Code or fill out an incentivized survey. If and when they follow through, you’ll know you’ve grabbed their attention.
  • Ask them to “like” or “follow” you on social media.
  • If you’re asking customers to call or text, give a phone number that will be used only for that campaign (so it’s clear what exactly they’re responding to).

Conversion rates
Conversion rates show how many customers actually acted on your offers. Did they use a discount code that you supplied? Did they sign up for your newsletter or take a survey?

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
This speaks to all of the costs that go into gaining a new customer. It sounds complicated, but it’s pretty simple to calculate: Just divide everything you spent on your campaign by the number of new customers that it brought in.

Lesson Learned

You need to know if your mailpiece is hitting its goal—setting solid KPIs and tracking response can do the trick. And everything you learn will come in handy for your next campaign, too.

An Intro to Tracking with Informed Delivery®

When it’s time to start tracking, you don’t have to do it all on your own. That’s where the Informed Delivery feature from USPS comes into play. It makes it easy to track your campaigns—and makes it a breeze for customers to respond. Plus, it’s free for both you and your customers.

With this feature, any residential customers who sign up for Informed Delivery updates can see their mail before it arrives, through a digital grayscale snapshot.[2]

Beyond this preview, Informed Delivery campaigns also give your customers access to any complementary digital elements you include, in the form of “ride-along content” and/or “representative images.”

  • Ride-along content can provide customers with a link to sign up for VIP membership, an exclusive online sale, or your social media account—pretty much whatever you want them to engage with. This allows you to see what type of content your customers are interacting with.
     
  • Representative images, meanwhile, show customers a full-color image of your mailpiece, rather than the usual gray-scale preview. If you’re sending out flats, you’re required to use representative images.
     

Exercise

We’ll go into all of this in more depth in the next section, but for now, take a break for some quick brainstorming: What kind of ride-along content would your customers like? Are they super-active on social? Will a discount get them excited to buy? Think about what they really want (remember Chapter 2?) to get started.

39% The best part of Informed Delivery campaigns? The results. 39% of marketers saw higher website traffic and 36% saw higher ROI.[3]
93% And customers love it too: 93% would recommend that friends, family and colleagues sign up themselves.[4]

Lesson Learned

Informed Delivery campaigns combine the physical and the digital, so you can reach customers in multiple places, then see how they interact with your brand.

The Details on Informed Delivery

To figure out if Informed Delivery campaigns are right for your brand, let’s dig a bit deeper into how they work.

What really makes Informed Delivery campaigns so special? They give your customers three ways to engage, as shown in Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2

  1. The digital preview of the mailpiece, viewable via email, as well as the USPS mobile app and online dashboard
  2. The ride-along content you include, whether you choose to link to a product launch or video
  3. The mailpiece itself
77% 77% of Informed Delivery notifications are opened daily, on average.[5]

Keep in mind that they can also see previews of larger mail, such as catalogs or magazines, but only if you’ve set up a synced digital marketing campaign. You can get in touch with the experts at USPS for more info on this.

And on your end, through USPS’ web-based Informed Delivery app, you’ll be able to see how customers are interacting with your campaigns, giving you info on:

  • Informed Delivery email opens
  • Click-throughs on any ride-along content you include
  • Number of mailpieces sent to customers with Informed Delivery accounts
  • Dates that mailpieces were processed for delivery
  • ZIP Code™ numbers of recipients with Informed Delivery accounts

All of the insights you gain can then be used to shape future campaigns and identify areas for improvement. You can head to PostalPro for more details on Informed Delivery data.

Ready to learn how to set up a free campaign? Head to the Informed Delivery tutorial.

Lesson Learned

The Informed Delivery feature gives you three distinct chances to engage with your customers, giving them the info and offers they want—and giving you the data you need to track success.

Footnotes
  1. [1]QR Code is a registered trademark of Denso Wave Inc.
  2. [2]Exterior images are only provided for letter-size mailpieces that are processed through USPS’ automated equipment. Package tracking information on Priority Mail®, Priority Mail Express® and other trackable parcels is also provided.
  3. [3]“Direct Mail Conversion Research,” USPS, February 2019. Please note: All statistics were based on a survey of 75 marketing decision-makers.
  4. [4]“October 2020 Informed Delivery User Survey,” USPS, 2020.
  5. [5]“October 2020 Snapshot,” USPS, 2020.

Need help? Reach out to the Mailing & Shipping Solutions Center at [email protected] and a team member will be in touch.