Response Tracking with SnailWorks
April 30, 2020   Dave Lewis

It’s not exactly new, but it’s certainly becoming very popular:  Using Informed Visibility to track direct mail response.  The concept is very simple.  You change the Intelligent Mail barcode on your BRE or RAE and it becomes trackable.  Then every morning you can see how many people dropped a reply in the mail the day before.  With response as difficult to predict as it has been lately, it’s precious information, and it is probably our simplest product. Here’s how you do it:
  1. Contact your SnailWorks Project Manager and tell them you want to track responses for a project. If you don’t have an account with SnailWorks or you’re not sure who your project manager is, contact us and we’ll take care of that.  Have your current reply envelope handy – we’ll need some information from that;
  2. Your Project Manager will send you the correct IMb to print on your envelopes. We can get you the IMb in less than an hour.  We can get you BRE art, if you prefer (from the Postal Service), overnight;
  3. Have your printer use the IMb we provided in place of the old IMb on your reply envelopes;
  4. Use those envelopes in your mailing – we’ll be tracking them!
So, the only production change you’ll be making is a different barcode on your reply envelope.  SnailWorks does everything else.  There are a couple of strategies you can use with this simplified tracking:
  • You can print ALL of your reply envelopes using this same IMb, so you’ll always know how many pieces are being mailed to you each day, but you won’t know which mailing they’re from. This way you can print your envelopes in bulk;
  • You can use a different IMb for each project or each split so you can track and compare response rates for individual jobs or splits.
We have clients do it both ways.  It just depends on what your objectives are. If you decide at some point you no longer want to track your responses, you can still use the same reply envelopes – they’ll work just fine for getting your mail delivered, even if you don’t need the tracking data. We have lots of other inbound tracking products that can track individual pieces, anticipate revenue, and more.  Contact us to learn more about all of our inbound tracking services.

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