How do you measure the effectiveness of your print marketing campaign? Data collection is a critical tool in today’s world and companies of every size and industry utilize data in some form or fashion every day. The data provides critical insight so businesses can better understand their customers, the user experience, buying patterns, and even if their print marketing campaign is well-received.
Digitally sourced marketing data, like tabulating how many emails are read or how many newsletters are opened is the easiest type of data for a company to utilize since gathering and analyzing it can be a seamless process. But data can be collected from physical marketing efforts like those used in a print marketing campaign as well.
Companies that use a print marketing campaign can harness the power of data to measure their print marketing campaign’s effectiveness to help understand what is working and which marketing strategies are not worth their time or money.
Why It’s Important to Know If Your Print Marketing Campaign Is Working
The value in developing and executing a print marketing campaign is to meet a specific goal. For many businesses, marketing campaigns may focus on improving overall sales, increasing sales on a specific product or service, or even raising brand awareness and name recognition for the company.
But running a print marketing campaign costs money, so knowing if your campaign is working well or not at all can affect your business’s bottom line. Understanding which aspects of your marketing strategies are worth their cost and which are not moving the needle enough to make them worth the expenditure will save your business money.
Then you can focus on the marketing strategies that are beneficial and produce results that help you meet your marketing goals.
How to Determine If Your Print Marketing Campaign is Effective
Gathering concrete data about different aspects of your print marketing campaign, directly from your users, can give you a clear picture of what parts of your marketing efforts are working and which parts are not as effective.
Depending on what types of print marketing strategies you have in place, you can add a data collection element that will help your business evaluate its usefulness directly from your customer through their feedback or by tracking what they are doing.
1. Conduct a Survey
A straightforward way to see if your print marketing campaign is working as you intended it to is to ask your customers. Add a survey or even a single question to a spot that your customers are already accessing, like during the checkout process on your website.
Surveys in a pop-up box can be triggered to appear to website visitors with a short list of questions to answer. If your print marketing campaign’s purpose was to increase brand awareness, for example, you might ask new customers how they found out about the business. When evaluating their responses, it will be easy to see whether your print marketing campaign effectively reaches customers.
2. Connect a Phone Line
Using a dedicated phone line for sales and customer service is common, even for smaller companies that can utilize a phone service to help funnel calls to the right location. But a specific number can be used in conjunction with a print marketing campaign to make collecting data much more efficient.
The dedicated phone number can be used in the call to action of the print marketing campaign. So when someone calls on that line, a business can quickly see if the campaign is reaching customers or if the print marketing campaign should be adjusted.
3. Integrate Unique Codes on Each Method of Marketing
Your print marketing campaign might take many forms. Postcards, posters, flyers, newsletters and catalogs are all common print marketing tools that businesses use to connect with potential customers and reach their marketing goals. And a marketing strategy may employ one type of marketing in a campaign, or it may involve a multi-pronged approach.
Each tool, however, plays a part in reaching the overall marketing goal for a business. And each tool plays a specific role in most campaigns. Postcards, due to their relatively low cost compared to other types of printed materials, may be sent out to a larger group of potential customers with the goal of introducing a new product or service, while a more costly option like a brochure or a catalog may be sent out to a subset of customers that are most likely to make a purchase with the company.
In order to see if these marketing materials are effectively reaching customers, raising product awareness and increasing sales, each one could be stamped with a unique code that the customer enters at checkout. By evaluating which codes are utilized, a business can evaluate which print method is most effective or which one does not seem to be gaining traction with customers.
4. Track Print Effectiveness With a Custom URL
Collecting data on which customers visit your website can help you evaluate all kinds of things about your customers and their habits. And since digital marketing can easily include a link directly to your site, data from those interactions are fairly standard to collect for most businesses.
Printed marketing materials can also just as easily be tied to online activity by creating a custom URL that is placed in your marketing’s call to action that leads to a landing page on your website. Through your website’s web traffic analysis, you will be able to see how many and which customers visited your site using this unique URL. This data can assist in determining the success of that particular print marketing tool.
Boosting Effectiveness
Printed marketing materials are a key part of any campaign and developing them so that they complement ongoing efforts will give businesses the biggest bang for their marketing bucks.
Businesses can use two simple strategies to boost print marketing effectiveness: tying their printed tools with their digital ones and creating a test to see which tools are the most effective to use for their specific marketing goals.
Implement QR Codes: We use QR codes in our everyday lives in many places. From pulling up a menu at a restaurant to buying a movie ticket, consumers regularly access the information they need and complete transactions by scanning QR codes with their smartphones to connect rapidly with a business online.
These easily recognizable black-and-white codes are an excellent way to provide an instant connection between printed marketing materials and your business’s online presence. Since users don’t have to type in anything to find your website, you can provide instant access to your business without the consumer going to the wrong website accidentally or clicking on a similarly named site.
And by linking your QR code to a unique landing page on your website, you can collect critical data about your customer’s online habits that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing materials.
Test Marketing with A/B Trials: It’s not always easy to know ahead of time which print marketing strategy will be the best for your business’s needs. So instead of guessing, implement an A/B trial to test out which tool is the most effective.
This exploratory concept can help your business determine which version of your marketing materials performs the best so you can meet your marketing goals. Since visual appeal is a big factor in the effectiveness of print marketing campaigns, a business could test out two or more versions of the same catalog to see which one captured the largest quantity of new business.
By embedding a unique code into an otherwise identical catalog, a company can evaluate how well each version does with each demographic category while learning more about its target customers. On a smaller scale, a business could choose to send out different calls to action on their marketing materials to test out which one garnered the most responses or to evaluate how different demographic segments responded to them.
But the most important aspect of an A/B Trial is setting it up so that only one feature of the marketing material is being tested at a time. If different catalog covers were also connected to different versions of the catalog, for example, then it would be impossible to determine what contributed to statistically significant differences in the trial outcomes.
Getting Your Print Marketing Campaign Started
Whether you have a solid print marketing strategy in place or you are still in the planning stages, partnering with Dazzle Printing will ensure that your business’s print materials will look great and wow your customers from the very first glance.
Our professional, experienced printers can work with you to produce marketing tools that integrate effectiveness assessments built in right from the start like QR codes, custom URLs, or even unique codes.
Our print-on-demand model means that developing an A/B Test with your marketing materials is a snap since Dazzle Printing can print small or large quantities so you can make smart marketing decisions about your printed materials.
Contact us to get started developing your next printed marketing tool that will help you meet your business goals beautifully.
