Many new business owners neglect to properly measure their first direct marketing campaign. It’s a simple thing to ignore with so many other pressing duties. In effect, they’re marketing blind. What could be a great learning opportunity, ends in more confusing and costly sales lead flow. This is especially true for Business to Business sales.
Why many businesses fail to measure response:
- They often are fixated on doing the campaign because they believe it’ll work, no matter what. They have unrealistic expectations of the return on their investment. The marketing idea went from concept to complete and was so time consuming that they knew they were going to do it, so response measurement be damned.
- The campaign development was time consuming and measurement will be equally time consuming.
- The consumer response is so dismal that they aren’t even counting the orders.
- The original measurement idea isn’t as easy as it was once thought.
- They have other consumer marketing campaigns and initiatives and it’s difficult to separate customer order sources
- The sales team is so focused on getting the sale that they neglect to ask the customer. specifically what drove them to come to the store, shop for the product, caused them to call.
- Orders didn’t come in right away….so some lagging orders are not included in the measurement.
How do you measure the results?
- Number of orders
- Number of inbound calls
- Number of inquiries
- Number of applications
- Gross revenue increase for the time period of the sale event
- Gross profit increase for the time period of the sale event
With target marketing, you can measure exactly who came in to called in, visited your website, completed an application, requested a quote, or purchased your products and services. B2B sales teams will have a multitude of ways for customers to connect with an assigned representative.
Some of the more popular ways to collect responders are:
Coupon code – simple but effective way to capture exactly which campaign was effective, and which ones were not.
Coupon physically brought in – the old-fashioned physical couple that people save, and bring into your store, to get a percentage off.
Unique landing page – When you run an email campaign, be sure to create a separate landing page to catch who’s clicking from that email.
Sales team participation – Sales Form fields associated with a campaign that must be completed when the order is put in. Make it mandatory that a Business to Business sales rep include this simple line-item so the sales management can collect all responders accurately.
Unique phone number can be created that measures exactly how many times it’s rung. This is a simple measurement to do these days. All numbers can be routed to a main intake team, but routed numbers can tally exactly how many people called from one particular campaign or another.
Business Reply by Mail can be counted. These are basic forms that allow the business marketer to physically count the responders by how replies via the postal mail.
Designate one person to enforce this collection of responders, calls, inquiries, measurement, and have them report on the campaign progress each week or each month. I cannot emphasize enough how helpful this is. If you have a sales team, and/or multiple sales channels, designate one person to continually report on the various responders for all your campaigns.
Create a sub-account of an item – So, let’s say that you already sell product A every month and that item is measured every month. You can create an sub-account for that item that might be called, “Product A – January promo”. This way, all orders associated with that sub-account can be measured.
Ideally, you’ll want to also be measuring who is responding to your campaign. Knowing this allows you to look for patterns of responders. Of all those targeted in your campaign, which ones responded and what do they look like. Then you can refine your next marketing push and assume that focusing on just those types of prospects will increase your response rate.
Cost Per Customer Acquisition
Ideally, the more accurately a small business can measure the costs associated with acquiring a new customer, the better they’ll be at replicating the most cost-effective marketing. So, take good notes, and put in the time to measuring response. It pays to do this.