Make Your Print Promotions More Effective By Tracking Response

How many of you have spent the time thinking up a great promotion to offer your customers or potential customers, invested the money to have it designed and printed, and gone through the fun of addressing it to everyone on your distribution list only to be left wondering how well it was received in the end?

Of course the message you send out is important, and worth a lot of thought but what I want to address is how you will know if that message has grabbed any interest and successfully converted the interest to solid sales or if it fell flat.

As a business owner it is so important for you to know that your marketing dollars are being well spent, and one of the ways you can do this is to combine traditional print methods with the trackability of the Internet.

Next time you’re gearing up to do a promotion of your services, products, or events follow these steps and start tracking response for stronger advertising results.

1. Write your advertising copy.
You can either write this yourself, or look to working with a copywriter to do so. If writing it yourself, you may want to take a look at the following links for some ideas as to what makes a good ad or sales letter:

http://www.lousywriter.com/how_to_write_better_ad_copy.php
http://amrithallan.com/writing-effective-ad-copy.php
http://www.kuraoka.com/how-to-write-better-ads.html

2. Write down the promotional details.
With most promotions there is more relevant information than you will want to include on a postcard or letter, but you will need this information for step 4. There may also be specific terms, disclaimers, and the like that are important.

3. Chose the advertising format you will use and have the piece designed.
This could be in the form of a sales letter, postcard, rack card, or well just about anything you can think of since there are so many options when it comes to design and print.

4. Contact your web developer and have them build a squeeze page for you.
This is the key piece to tracking response! !!

I know, I know… “What the heck’s a squeeze page, Shayne?!” Basically a squeeze page is a single webpage with the sole purpose of capturing information for follow-up and tracking purposes.

Suggestions for your squeeze page:
- Make it specific to the promotion you are working on.
- Include the ad copy you wrote (or had written) in step 1.
- Include all of the supporting details you put together in step 2.
- Don’t include a bunch of links to other pages. This will water down your results and un-focus the reader.
- The use of testimonials to support the value of your offering is very valuable. Don’t forget this piece!
- Have a strong call to action. This could be to have the viewer give you contact info, register for an event or have them buy via a PayPal button if your offering is for a physical product.
- If you have an e-newsletter, include a sign up form.
- If you feel you must, include a simple link to the homepage of your website.
- A proper squeeze page will have a URL (web address) that cannot be reached through any of your site navigation. Ex: www.yourdomain.com/specialoffer

5. Have your promotion printed with the squeeze page URL as a very prominent part of your call to action!!!

Hit the Easy button and say it with me “That was easy!”
Now you have a print promotion that is trackable. You can assess whether the message you sent was successful in capturing interest by seeing how many people visited your squeeze page, and you can also assess how effective the call to action, details and testimonials were in converting that prospect to a purchase based on sales, registrations, or sign-ups.

That is direct response marketing made trackable by using the web as the valuable marketing tool that it really is!

I hope you have an awesome week, and enjoy all of the wonder the Christmas Season has to offer!