How
are your marketing programs doing? What’s
your average response rate, cost per sale and
size of sale? Which publications, venues, ads
and offers have received the best response?
If
you're like many business owners you've got
a gut feeling about all of these things, but
a death of hard data. If so, you're really flying
blind...and you may be wasting much of your
marketing budget as a result.
Better
Data = Better Decisions
Every
business should systematically track and analyze
responses to their marketing programs, so that
future decisions can be based on historical
results. What data should you capture? As much
as you can! For example, for print ads I recommend
that you track the publication name and circulation;
ad name, date and cost; offer and coupon code
(if applicable); date and amount of customer’s
purchase; and customer name and contact information
(if appropriate). Remember, it’s not enough
to know that a customer saw your ad in XYZ Publication;
you want to know if she saw this month’s
ad or the one you ran last fall.
Analyzing
Your Resonses
So
what do you do with all of this data? Start
by looking at your response rates for each marketing
program. This is the number of people who received
or had the opportunity to see a particular ad
or marketing piece divided by the number who
actually responded to it. Look to see how this
response rate changed if you changed the ad,
offer, publication, mailing list or other factor.
How many sales were made? Compare the average
cost per sale and size of sale of each program,
and then look at the return on investment (ROI)
by comparing the total net sales (or the anticipated
lifetime sales to these new customers) to the
cost of the program itself.
Think
of your historical data as a valuable treasure
trove of information, and use it to fine tune
and maximize the success of your marketing program.
