Analysing the response to your campaigns is one of the trickier elements of marketing.
Whether it’s direct mail, advertising or digital campaigns. Keeping track of your return on investment can help plan future projects more efficiently.
Whilst a direct link between marketing and sales may be what you’re looking for, there’s more to advertising. Initially we evaluate if the product or service you offer is one of immediate purchase. To expand on this, a car showroom shouldn’t expect a flurry of response. Most individuals don’t go buying cars on a monthly basis. In these cases, we use marketing to increase brand awareness. Then when the time comes, your business is front of mind.
It’s worth pointing out that 6 months down the line, a prospect may not remember where they’ve seen your name. Because of this, you shouldn’t drop specific marketing channels just because nobody mentions them directly.
Whilst this is all well and good for longer lifespan offerings, some of you may well have the here and now fix. Let’s look at some techniques we can apply to measure our response:
Physical coupons
Using Coupons is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Simply apply them to print materials using either solid or perforated formats for best effect. This allows you to simply count up how many coupons have been redeemed and measure response rate at a glance. The only downside? This method requires you to offer a discount or benefit of sorts. After all, as a buyer, why use a coupon that holds no benefit to me.
Coupon codes
We use coupon codes as the digital equivalent of physical coupons (although they can also applied to print products). They come with the same issues of requiring benefits (e.g discounts or freebies) but have the added advantage of automated tracking to give you instant response rates.
Variable URL's
Using variable URL’s allows us to send prospects to individualised web addresses, personalised to them. Email campaigns can be sent to an individual with links directed at a specified domain (www.yourbusiness.com/firstname-lastname). This allows us to see how many times a page is visited but also allows us to pinpoint specific persons of interest for additional/future campaigns.
QR Codes
A format of mixed opinion. However, most QR code generators can provide a dynamic service. This allows us to change the page redirect for single codes in order to provide valuable analytics and measure response.
Landing Page
A more simple method, applicable to both print and digital media is landing pages. By setting up a dedicated micro-site for additional information, not only can we optimise content in mailings, but also track those who are interested in finding out more.
Footfall
A less effective way to monitor response, is through footfall. Tracking volume of customers or visitors on a daily basis is a laborious task but can give you some insight into marketing effectiveness.
Contact
In a similar way to footfall, tracking call and email numbers can also give you an insight. You can also do the same with your website through Google analytics. All of which are relative as not directly linked to your marketing, but it’s worth tracking.
Of course sales can be used as one channel to measure although as we mentioned, direct results are ultimately uncountable.
Track what you can, keep all channels open and never underestimate the power of brand awareness.
Why not let our team take a look at your site, to derive accurate marketing channels and funnels that increase your business sales. Send us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
