Direct-mail glossary

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Also known as: cost per customer, cost per new patient, CPA

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the total cost of a marketing campaign divided by the number of new customers, patients, or conversions it produces. It is the clearest single metric for evaluating whether a direct-mail campaign is profitable.

Why it matters

To calculate CPA: take the total spend on a campaign (postage, printing, design, list cost) and divide by the number of new customers gained from that campaign. If you mail 500 postcards at $0.80 each (total: $400) and acquire 8 new patients, your CPA is $50. Whether that is good depends entirely on the lifetime value (LTV) of a patient at your practice. For many small health and home-service businesses, a single new patient or customer relationship is worth hundreds to thousands of dollars over their lifetime — making a $50–$100 CPA quite attractive. Tracking CPA requires knowing how many responses came from the campaign, which is why attribution tools like QR code tracking and personal URLs are important. Without them, you can only estimate.

CardCadence

How CardCadence handles it

CardCadence's per-piece pricing ($0.75, $0.80, or $1.13 all-in) makes CPA straightforward to calculate: multiply pieces mailed by the per-piece cost to get total campaign spend, then divide by conversions. The QR code in every postcard design gives you the response denominator — how many people scanned — so your CPA calculation rests on real data rather than guesses. Remember it counts scans, not phone calls, so a scan-based CPA is a ceiling: your true cost per acquisition is likely better than it looks.

Related terms

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