Hi,
I'm designing a report to track direct mailing responses. I was wondering- how do you all report on direct mailings?
E.g do you use a proxy: Anyone who received a direct mailing and booked within a pre-defined time frame, or
Anyone who has an internal source selected at the box office (how does this work with web?), or
A generic source etc.
Any examples/ideas would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Sam
Sam (and Matt):
For the reasons that Sam states, we pull a list/report of all constituents who booked during the time period under evaluation (along with number of tickets/subscriptions purchased and associated revenue information) and send the file out to a third party to matchback to the originally mailed list. That allows us to understand the performance of each of our mailing segments as well as the outside lists that we used. This isn’t perfect as, obviously, you cannot be exactly sure that the order was a result of the mailing (it could have been from a variety of overlapping advertising and communications sources) but it’s the best that we’ve been able to figure out how to evaluate since so many people do not use source codes when on the web, calling our phone center or at our box office.
If you find a better solution, would be grateful for that thought.
Elizabeth
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Elizabeth Weisser Director of CRM 92nd Street Y | 1395 Lexington Avenue | New York, NY 10128 | P: 212.415.5596 | http://www.92Y.org
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From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Matthew Hodge Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:39 AM To: Elizabeth Weisser Subject: Re: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Tracking Direct Mailing responses
Hi Sam,
I've been doing a bit of thinking about this one as well, because it is a vexed question. If you go for just a Source code approach, if somebody orders something on the web, you'll just get the Generic web source, unless you embed a source code in a URL or make them type in a promo to get a special offer. But if somebody reads your email or DM and comes to your website without going through a special link or without using a promo, you're not going to get that order registered as part of the ROI.
So what I'm thinking of doing is creating a report where I look at everybody who got promoted with a certain source and then seeing what they bought (# of customers, tickets and revenue) between the promotion date and the source end date. So the source becomes primarily a vehicle for flagging that somebody got a DM and giving a start and end date.
It's still a route fraught with peril, though, because if you send out DMs that overlap on dates, this kind of approach would double-count the revenue. Would love to see hear what anybody else has done?
Cheers,
Matt
From: Sam Carelse <bounce-samanthacarelse8238@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 10/3/2013 10:31:37 AM
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Sam and Matt,
We do something very similar to 92Y because we have the same challenge - people just don't give us the source codes frequently enough to provide accurate response reporting.
Like 92Y, we use a third-party to analyze our responses from our mailings, including trade segments, but I also track the internal responses to mailings through T-Stats. If the mailing list is smaller than the size limit for TStats, I simply create a list of the patrons I mailed and check it off for Tstats. I then create a sales report in TStats measuring the products I promoted in the mailing and set the mailing list as a filter to see what those patrons bought, average order size and more.
If the mailing list is larger than the size limit for TStats, I create a list that queries all the patrons from my mailing list + the purchase criteria that matches. I then use that list as the filter in TStats to measure revenue, programs purchased, etc.
All of this allows me to measure sales throughout the course of the 5-6 weeks that my mail campaign runs. I know fairly quickly if a mailing is working or not, allowing me to make nimble decisions about when to send additional emails/postcards and even what specific programs to highlight in those materials. If I know something is selling well already, I may tailor subsequent communications to emphasize what's popular.