Measuring attribution

Marketing attribution is important in measuring performance for any channel, online or offline, because it helps to understand the specific impact of any certain content that is driving lead conversions, and thus driving revenue. In the context of multi-channel campaigns, direct attribution allows you to know for certain whether a direct mail touch was the one that drove a conversion.

Traditional channels are historically challenging to target and measure, with direct mail being an 'Exhibit A' example of this issue. However, as a modern intelligent mail platform, Lob offers various approaches to measure attribution as best possible and to provide greater visibility in a rather opaque channel.

Embedding customized CTAs

Similar to email, direct mail campaigns can measure direct attribution by creating a customized call-to-action CTA that's unique to the end-recipient of the mail piece. This can be a URL, coupon code, phone number, or QR code. Ideally, each CTA should be as dynamically generated and unique as possible, and can be tracked individually if it is followed. If not down to the individual level, creating unique CTAs for each campaign (or cohorts within it) would allow a better understanding of how specific campaigns or cohorts are driving better conversions.

Triggering downstream workflows with webhooks

Webhooks allow real-time notifications of mail status for individual mail pieces (generated in the form of tracking events) as it progresses through the USPS mailstream. The two most impactful scanned events are the "Processed for Delivery" and "Delivered" events, which means that a USPS courier is about to deliver mail within the next day, or has successfully delivered the mail piece, respectively. If you have a multichannel campaign in progress, you can design for either of these events to trigger an additional sequence of events downstream, such as reinforcement reminders using other digital channels, a limited-time-only action, or some other action or acknowledgment that's unique to your business workflow.

These webhooks and ensuing downstream triggers can indirectly impact your mail piece's broader success or conversion, along with the overall campaign involving the direct mail touch.

Assigning metadata to retrieve data

Metadata can be used to identify, locate, and "tag" mail pieces or particular campaigns. While metadata is not directly responsible for attribution, appropriately tagging mail pieces is a critical step in measuring attribution at a more granular level.

Learn more about metadata and how it can help measure conversion and attribution through various ways of tagging in our Lob systems.

Attribution Analytics in the dashboard

Access to our Attribution Analytics feature is exclusive to Enterprise Edition customers. Upgrade to the appropriate Print & Mail Edition to gain access.

This feature is currently in beta. If you are an Enterprise-plan customer, ask your Account Manager to enable this tab in your Mail Analytics dashboard.

If you have sent any mail containing QR Codes, the next step is learning the engagement rates associated with these mailpieces. The Attribution Analytics tab will track how the mailpieces you’ve sent with QR Codes are performing over a selected period of time.

Filtering

In this tab, you can:

• Filter by a date range and form factor

• See the number of mailpieces sent with QR Codes during that time period

• See the number of QR Codes that have been scanned during that time period

• See a graph of QR Code scans over a selected date range

Exporting data

You can export this data (svg, png, csv) by clicking the hamburger menu located at the top right of the graph.

Best practices:

• Filter for specific subsets of your mail by leveraging metadata. For example, use this to learn the engagement rate of a specific send or Campaign.

• To receive more detailed analytics, such as time of scan, IP Address, etc, reference QR Analytics endpoint in our API documentation.