Marketing ROI Calculator: Measuring Your Postcard's Success

How do you know if your postcard marketing is working? You can easily measure the number of responses to your various mailings as well as your return on investment, so you never have to guess. The key is knowing what to measure and how, and for that you can use this simple marketing ROI calculator.
Think of it as a chart that plots your success. In fact, creating a matrix you can use as a reference will make these numbers even more valuable.
Metrics for Calculating ROI
BODY COUNT
The first thing you’ll want to figure out using your marketing ROI calculator is how many people responded to your postcard mailing. Your overall response rate is simply a percentage that compares the number of responses to the quantity of postcards you mailed. If you sent out 500 postcards and 50 people followed up, that’s a 10% response rate. (Nice job!)
RESPONSE/COST COMPARISONS
If you love statistics, you can use your marketing ROI calculator to compute your cost per response (or cost per lead), cost per sale (if not all respondents actually buy), etc. Using postcard marketing to prospect for new patients, clients or customers can be particularly cost-effective, because cost per lead is significantly higher than using email. If you use postcard marketing year round, you can determine your response rate per week, month, etc. to find patterns, then change your tactics to boost slower times or take better advantage of “hot” response periods.
REVENUE EARNED
Response rate is just a raw number. Whether it’s “good” or not depends on how much revenue you derived as a result of those responses. If your products or services are inexpensive, you’ll need a lot of sales to generate a profit, whereas fewer sales will get you there if your average price is higher. Smart marketers track postcard responses by customer. That way, besides seeing the total income you generated, you can see which customers buy more.
ROI is the Big Daddy of Measurements
As much as you can learn from measuring response rates in multiple ways, what you really want to know is did I make a profit? A little, or a lot? That’s your return on investment. Simply add up the total revenue from your postcard campaign, subtract your expenses, and there you have it. If you earned $2,500 and spent $500, you netted $2,000 and generated a 500% return, or five times what you spent. (Nice job!)
Calculating Customer Lifetime Value.
Nothing sends your marketing ROI calculator off the charts like customer loyalty. And you can actually attach a number to those most precious customers – it’s called Customer Lifetime Value.
If you don’t already know what your average sale amount is over time, look back through your records to figure it out. Multiply that dollar amount by the number of times an average customer or patient buys from you in one year, then multiply that new figure by the number of years you expect to retain an average customer or patient. Now you know why loyal customers are golden! As noted above, if you track individual customers, you can calculate CLV for each one.
Tips to boost your responses and ROI even higher:
- Use a special phone number on your postcards to make tracking a breeze. You’ll be able to record and learn from your calls, too.
- Mail monthly for maximum ongoing results year round.
- Study your customers to keep refining your targeting, so you can reach new prospects (especially niche segments) most effectively.
- Study your response results to learn which offers work best, so you can “up the ante” on future mailings. Ask your direct mail expert whether you should use more than one offer on your postcard.
The big focus in marketing these days is analytics. Thankfully, direct mail makes it super-easy to analyze results using your marketing ROI calculator.

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Cactus Mailing is a full-service direct mail agency that can provide everything you need for your campaign including design, list assembly, printing, and mailing. We can even setup and manage Google display and social content ads through our Smart Marketing options.