Foot Traffic Attribution from Canada Post: Using Mobile Tracking to Assess Direct Mail’s Effectiveness in Driving Traffic to Your Store

We’re liking the direction that Canada Post is taking with new service offerings based on mobile phone tracking. In addition to its new and innovative Location-Based Audiences offering, they are also taking the brave step of using the data to assess the effectiveness of a direct mail campaign on physical traffic to a retail or other location.

This new service is called Foot Traffic Attribution and it uses mobile phone tracking data to compare a target group’s visitation activity to the desired retail location or locations prior to and following the receipt of your direct mail campaign. It’s a clever way to track campaign effectiveness without depending on coupon redemption or loyalty programs.

The first step is to plan the direct mail campaign. You can use Personalized Mail, Postal Code Targeting or Neighbourhood Mail. Establish the geographical area where your direct mail campaign will be distributed and also establish the retail location or locations that will be monitored and to which your mailing will attempt to drive traffic and response.

For 30 days prior to the date your mailing is dropped and for another 30 days following, mobile phone traffic at the selected retail locations will be tracked and those coming from the postal codes targeted by your campaign identified. An analysis is performed and a report produced.

By tracking in-store mobile phone traffic prior and post campaign, you can and determine the lift in traffic and therefore get a very strong quantifiable estimate of the incremental impact of your campaign. You get metrics on a unique visitor basis including visit frequency, time of visits and amount of time spent in-store. You can also compare locations if you have more than one involved in the campaign.

We call this offering from Canada Post brave because, well, it is always possible that it could show that a direct mail campaign was not effective in creating incremental foot traffic. But knowing is better than guessing and Canada Post, like ourselves, believe it will show that direct mail is an indispensable marketing tool for creating store traffic.

If you’d like to explore how this and other data can be leveraged in your business to create powerful direct mail campaigns, invite us to spend some time with you. Send us an email today.