What good does it do if you create a nice direct mail piece, market yourself well but you can't tell what made you successful? How do you know if your direct mail piece is working or if your success came from something else? Intuitively you know the pieces are working-- but how can you measure that success quantitatively? If you sent out 1000 postcards and received one reply, you'd likely stop sending them out before long. But if you sent out 1000 postcards and received 20 solid contacts, you'd probably look to find a way to send out 2000 postcards next time! 
Every marketing piece you do should have some vehicle to identify it worked. Some folks use dedicated telephone numbers to receive their replies so they can separate routine contacts from these marketing pieces. Others use unique codes printed on the specific pieces they develop-- and they ask clients somehow to provide that code back to them so it can be tracked. Doing this relies on the client to follow through and isn't always a perfect measurement-- but it's better than no measurement at all!
Your website can be your greatest lead capture tool! If your postcard campaign offered a view of a recent listing, a great seasonal recipe, a handy garden tip, or other "good sticky" content give your prospects the opportunity to get more of those things directly from you by asking for them via your website! Direct them to your site, allow them to select the item they were especially interested in, and offer to send them additional similar items directly. All the prospect need do is provide you a place to receive the information... an email address for an electronic version, a physical address for a hard copy, etc. Use your website to ask visitors to provide their contact information and offer to keep them informed with items similar to those they've requested. We recommend asking for first name, last name, street address, and email only. 
By asking for a phone number, studies show that you will decrease the number of people who would have completed the form by 83%. Place the content capture page after they have had a chance to look at one recipe, one listed house or one garden tip. Again, studies show that if you provide your customers with an idea of what they can expect from you, the completion rate of your capture page will increase by 74%.
Talk to your webmaster or your web hosting company and they can provide statistics of what pages on your website are the most visited. Then make certain that you have a contact capture area set up on the top 5 most visited pages. Also, leverage your ability to count activity on certain pages by driving people to these pages via your offline marketing efforts-- postcards, flyers, and other printed materials. One strategy that has worked well for many agents is to offer something of value to respondents that enter a specific code they would only learn from your direct mail campaigns-- "enter the code from the lower right hand side of this postcard on my website and be entered to win a free blah blah blah or automatically receive a such and such...." Give people a reason to offer up their contact information and then give them a reason to bookmark your website. And use your direct mail efforts to drive them to that magic spot where they can do so!
The goal of your direct mail campaigns is to cultivate your farming area and to build up your list of leads/opportunities. You must capture the customer's information in order to continue to build your business and you must know what campaigns are helping you do that-- so you can do more of them!
If you'd like to revisit other sections on this topic:
Do you need to review Direct Mail Secret #1?
Do you need to review Direct Mail Secret #2?
Would you like to continue on to Direct Mail Secret #4?
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