One of the most difficult parts of creating a direct mail campaign is proving ROI and tracking results.   Why?  Well, because frankly it’ s more fun to focus on the creation of a piece than to focus on adding up results.  There are many ways you can track a direct mail piece, from using a unique website URL or even personalized url’s to using unique email addresses, but for this blog post I’ll just focus on phone numbers.

Using a unique phone number is advantageous to a special URL for a number of reasons.  For example, if you created a special landing page on your website, let’s say it’s “www.quantumdigital.com/promo1″.  Instead of typing out the full URL “www.quantumdigital.com/promo1″, recipients may elect to just type in everything except the “promo1″.  In this case, your web analytics software would not discern that this web visit is tied to your campaign.  However, if you use a unique phone number, you’re forcing recipients to use only that response method.   This gives more accurate tracking overall.

Thankfully, the pricing for “forwarding phone numbers” or “tracking phone numbers” has come down in the past few years. I’ll outline a few things to look for amongst the providers out there as well as some popular providers.

Professional / Enterprise-class Call Tracking Providers

Things to look for:

• Multiple phone number provision – If you’re launching multiple different campaigns to different audiences/market segments, you’re going to need multiple phone numbers.
• Dashboard tracking functionality – you want to be able to get reports of how many people called into which phone number over a certain time period, this helps to track response over 1 piece or multiple pieces that use the same phone number
• Option to buy the phone number.  Sometimes your advertised phone number will become so popular that it might rival your traditional phone number.  If this happens, you want the ability to buy the phone number outright from the provider
• Reasonable ongoing cost – look for both monthly pricing and per minute pricing.  There may be a difference between the per minute incoming call price and an additional per minute fee to forward the call.
• Fresh phone numbers – make sure the provider gives you a phone number that hasn’t been recently used by another business.  If you’re unsure, do a google search or a reverse phone number search.

CallSource , RingCentral and TeleCapture are a few that offer more robust interfaces and tracking capabilities.  A few also offer the option to buy the phone numbers. Another option to buy phone numbers is to call your phone company.  Be aware, though, that your phone company will not have the tracking features these companies have, nor will they be able to guarantee that the phone number hasn’t been recently used by another company.

Free & Low Cost Providers

For those of you balking at spending $30/month+ for one of the above solutions, here are a few low cost tricks you can use to measure response.

Skype is a popular software program to call people using your computer.  What not alot of people know, is that they offer the ability to have a local telephone number assigned to you.  This costs about $60/year, or $5/month (perhaps less if you buy an outgoing monthly subscription).  You will probably want a monthly subscription with Skype (unlimited calling in the US & Canada through your computer), because with that monthly subscription comes the feature of free call forwarding.  This basically means you can pay $8/month for unlimited call forwarding from a unique tracking phone number.

A competitor of Skype’s, Gizmo5 / Gizmo5 Business has a similar model to skype.  Instead of a monthly “Call Out” subscription, Gizmo5 offers per minute credits.  You can pay either per minute or get discounts by buying blocks of credits.  If you forward your calls through Gizmo to your regular business phone number, you’ll need these “Call Out” credits.  In addition, you’ll need one of their “Call In” numbers.  For US phone numbers, this equates to about $35 yearly, slightly less than Skype’s.

Also, Google is launching a product called Grand Central which is free, but the product is still in beta, so is unreliable for our purposes at present.  For any of the above programs, just know that one of the most important aspects is the ability to track incoming prospect phone calls.  See below for a screenshot of Gizmo5’s call history.  With software programs you will have to do more manual tracking or counting incoming calls on a call history screen.  With Enterprise-class providers, this reporting is prepared for you automatically.  I will have to research further how many calls Skype & Gizmo5 hold in their call history.   If you expect realistically hundreds of incoming phone calls over a few weeks time, you’ll likely need an enterprise-level provider.