My Marketing Isn’t Working! Part Six: Response Mechanisms
Are you measuring your response rates?
When I ask about response rates or conversion rates all too often my customers convey that they have no idea what types of responses they are getting to their marketing. This is counterproductive to their marketing efforts.
If you don’t know the response rates to a marketing piece, you don’t know whether or not it is effective. If you don’t know whether or not it is effective, then you don’t know if it is a worthy return on your investment. If you don’t know if it is a good return on your investment, then you are just blindly pumping money into your marketing.—does any of this make sense?
Response mechanisms can come in many forms that can apply to different marketing pieces and different budgets. Personalized URLs, generic URLs, landing pages, and online surveys can all be used to capture who is responding to your call-to-action (register to win an iPod touch before September 1st at www.XyZ.com).
These online response mechanisms are very effective, very impressive, and generate more response rates but they are not fitting for every project or budget. Some response mechanisms can include a toll free number, calling a specific salesperson, or sending an email to a specific address, all of which can be measured.
Another alternative is to use your marketing piece as your response mechanism. Perhaps your campaign includes a coupon/voucher with a serial number that must be redeemed for the incentive. At the end of the promotion you can calculate how many vouchers were redeemed and determine who responded by the serial number.
Sometimes a response mechanism will generate no response. Although unfortunate, this is still very useful feedback. It may be time to rethink the before mentioned elements of your marketing piece and uncover why it isn’t effective. Remember, no feedback is good feedback!
Analyzing your marketing performance is key to successful marketing efforts. This is the most important step of the entire marketing process. It will help drive better results and your marketing performance depends on it!