According to Small Biz Genius, house lists had a direct mail response rate of 9% last year.
When you compare that number against the direct mail vs email statistics suggesting that email had a 3.3% click-through rate in the first quarter of this year, it's no surprise that more and more marketers are turning some of their attention back to direct mail. Even direct mail fundraising statistics showed similar numbers.
The catch? Many companies struggle with finding the right metrics to measure their campaigns against. That's why we're about to list 5 direct mail statistics that every business should know before starting a new campaign.
Just keep reading to learn more about direct mail statistics for offline advertising.
1. Response Rate
With direct mail campaigns, the raw numbers almost never tell the whole story. A campaign that prompts 10,000 responses is fantastic if you've sent 20,000 pieces of mail. But if you've sent mailers to a list of 10 million, that number is probably not so great.
If you don't understand direct mail response rates, your team might not be able to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
You can calculate your response rate by dividing the number of people who responded to your campaign by the total number of people you mailed.
2. Conversion Rate
At the end of the day, there's a huge difference between a website visit and a sale.
To that end, conversion rates will tell you how many of the people responding to your advertising are actually purchasing your product or service. If there's a sticking point in the sales process, this number may be able to let you know.
The conversion rate is found by dividing the number of orders by the number of people who responded to your offer.
3. Return on Investment
With any type of marketing, businesses have to walk a fine line. You want your campaign to work but you also need your campaign to be economically feasible. The number that you would use to find out how much money you made for every dollar you spent is what's known as a return on investment.
You can calculate this metric by subtracting revenue from campaign costs and then dividing that number by campaign costs again.
4. Cost Per Acquisition
Cost per action numbers are another essential set of direct mail campaign statistics. Most of the time, you'll see this listed as the cost per acquisition (CPA) where businesses are trying to calculate how much they've spent in order to gain new customers.
Revenues can get some nice lift during a campaign but if you're not converting new buyers, you may not be gaining the right amount of market share.
CPAs are calculated by taking the cost of your campaign and dividing it by the number of orders.
5. Lifetime Customer Value
Believe it or not, direct mail campaigns don't fully end when you stop sending mailers.
Sometimes your customers might buy at a discount initially only to become loyal customers later on.
Unlike a conversion rate or a response rate, lifetime customer value may look different for different businesses. But when assessing the effectiveness of a direct mail campaign, this is a number you'll want to know.
How Direct Mail Statistics Can Help Your Business Make More Money
Whether you're looking at business to business direct mail or business to consumer direct mail, knowing the right direct mail statistics can make all the difference in terms of measuring your ROI and getting results from your campaigns. Mailers make a difference!
Keep browsing the rest of this site for our latest marketing and advertising tips. We publish a wide variety of helpful articles on direct mailer advertising and print marketing.
