Many LERN members want to know whether it is possible to track for the impact of the printed promotions they mail. The answer, says William Draves, President of LERN, is “absolutely.”
Of course, it is never going to be possible to have 100 percent accuracy in tracking source information for registrations. It never has been possible in our business, he says, and it is even more complicated today with multiple marketing strategies such as social media, online marketing, email marketing, as well as print media.
However, it is very possible to get a good idea of what works and what does not work in terms of your marketing strategies. For your online marketing, your website should be designed to collect information about customer behavior, such as:
1. Pages visited
2. Amount of time spent on a page
3. Search terms
4. Sales conversions
While you will never know precisely whether everyone who registered online the day after your brochure was delivered was driven there by the brochure, by looking at the trends in online registration and comparing them with other marketing events, as well as registrations via phone and email for the same periods, you can develop a fairly sophisticated understanding of what your print marketing is doing in terms of generating responses.
Draves notes further that, in our business, we do what works, and we need to keep doing that, but it is important that we measure the impact of our various marketing approaches. A good example is the decision by many of our members to eliminate their print promotions because most of their registrations come in online. In almost every case, when this has happened, registrations have seen precipitous declines. People are learning about the program’s classes in the print catalog, although they go online to register. Having information for senior administrators, who are often the ones who make the decisions to drop the print promotions, is extremely important.
Another strategy you can use is to ask your registrants how they learned about the class they are signing up for. Again, you will to get 100 percent accuracy with this question, because sometimes people don’t know, but asking the question is another way to track for source of marketing information. Is it necessary to track every mailing every term? Draves suggests that every other year is fine to show whether there is a change in the typical responses from customers.