Direct Mail, in a digital age it is easy to overlook. Many assume that it has gone the way of the newspaper, landlines and the department store. But direct mail’s physical presence is what makes it novel in a world where we see over 500 digital ads in a day. Here are some stats on how consumers feel about receiving direct mail:

• Direct mail household response rate is 5.1% (compared to .6% email, .6% paid search, .2% online display, .4% social media).
• 54% people want to receive direct mail from brands they’re interested in.
• 56% believe that print marketing is the most trustworthy form of marketing.
• 40% consumers will give a new business a chance upon receiving direct mail from them.

But how do you keep it modern in our digital world?

One of the main issues you hear about direct mail is, how do you track it? 

Fortunately, there are a couple of ways we can accomplish this. The first is tracking links. Tracking links allow you to know the source that someone came to your website from. These can be a bit cumbersome for someone to type into their address bar, however. You can enter the URL into a URL shortener, such as bit.ly.  You can make them in Google URL Builder or a marketing platform that supports the creation of tracking links as well. 

If you have an e-commerce store or can otherwise support it, discount codes can be an effective way to track your marketing efforts at a granular level. Just make a discount code for each level of the campaign that you want to track. For instance, if you were setting up a discount code for a direct mail campaign in the fall, you could make the code: FALL2019