Start Today: Tracking Your Print Marketing ROI

Do you know where your print marketing money is going or which of your print marketing plans has been most successful?

It is not uncommon that we meet people who believe keeping track of print marketing ROI is impossible or at least very difficult. Keeping track of ROI is not only important to know which plan has been most successful in the past, but also because advertising budgets are shrinking across the nation.

Before you can track ROI on printed marketing materials, establish the sought after response and include a call to action on all your brochures, flyers, and other promotional material that allows you to measure the response the material is designed to generate.

Popular and successful strategies to track the source of sales and leads include voucher or coupon codes tied to special offers and allocated to different print media and contact channels, customized website landing pages, and QR codes.

What’s the strategy?

Track the ROI of all print materials and see which campaigns are profitable and which are not. 

When the time comes to reorder, keep the best performing offer, use that as a control, and make changes to under-performing materials using a new code.

Replace campaigns which don’t perform as well as the control, making one or two small changes and unique codes for each variant. At the end of the new campaign, if the control still outperforms it, you make more changes and try again. If the campaign outperforms the control, it becomes the new control and you keep that campaign and run another alongside it to try and improve response rates and ROI further.

Here are some ways to do that:

Postal order forms
Tracking the source of orders or leads from postal order forms is relatively easy, as you can include a tracking code on the form itself.

Phone orders and inquiries
By allocating voucher or discount codes to each brochure, flyer or leaflet, identify which items are generating results and calculate the value of each before ordering reprints. Also, train customer service and sales staff to ask where customers who don’t provide a code heard about the company, and track these.

Website responses
Track website responses through the use of personalized landing pages (PURLs) including codes customized for each customer. This ensures their exposure to your offer remains constant between printed and electronic media (using the same look and feel, the same headings and call to action, etc.) and reduces consumer confusion, thereby increasing conversion rates.

You can also use analytics packages such as Google’s analytics to track which pages customers view before ordering or abandoning an order, and use this information to reduce leakage and increase ROI.

Using response codes
Use QR codes or discount coupons and vouchers to track responses. Ideally, include a text code in the URL for your website that matches the discount or offer code collected by phone staff, and include a QR code for those who want to use them.

Response codes that aren’t tied to a special offer give the consumer no incentive to share the code with you, so always add value to the code in some way; whether it’s a discount, a free bonus, or extra product to encourage customers to use the code.

If you hand materials out at trade shows, use location specific codes so you can see which regions are more responsive to which offers.

Action without a plan is rarely successful. Know where your print marketing money is going.

The Tray Way is the blog for Tray, experts in the printing, mailing, logistics and promotional products. You can learn more about our capabilities by visiting our website, as well as our Facebook and Twitter pages. For information about the company and its successes, visit www.trayinc.com