Yellow Pages Or Online Advertising? Find Out What Works Best For Your Business With CRM Systems

Do you measure the effectiveness your offline marketing activities? It’s okay, no need to be embarrassed, most business owners don’t. However without this vital information you could be throwing away good money on multiple marketing strategists that just don’t work for you. And in today’s economy waste cannot be tolerated, to stay alive every dollar counts.

When it comes to marketing waste, Yellow Pages is a repeat offender. But before we move onto discussing the pro’s and con’s of the yellow pages it’s important to understand the mechanics of marketing data.

So how do you track and measure the success of each marketing campaign? Well it’s not easy, especially when you rely upon manual systems. Trying to track the source of new clients manually using spreadsheets and log books takes up valuable staff time. It is also difficult to translate into meaningful statistics. There is no point in collecting the data if you can’t use it identify patterns in your marketing returns.

CRM systems make tracking and interpreting marketing data simple and easy.

So what are CRM systems? CRM is short for customer relationship management software. These programs store and manage important customer information, including the source of each new customer. Once you have recorded where each new customer came from you can also use the charting and forecasting tools to measure the success of past marketing campaigns and predict their future potential with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Now when it comes to online activities (such as people who come to your site from the online yellow pages directory) finding out where the customer came from is easy. Most new CRM systems have web integration capabilities. So they can track the source of any new clients who come through your website (or websites) and automatically update your database accordingly.

Offline activities is where it gets tricky. If everyone calls you through your main telephone number separating the source of new customers becomes difficult. So which people called because one of your existing clients referred them? Who came from that magazine ad? And who is calling from your Yellow Pages listing. If you ask people where they heard about you it can break the flow of the sale. Staff will also forget to ask or forget to enter the answer into your CRM. Meaning you’ll end up with patchy and incomplete data.

The simple solution is using dedicated 1300 (or 1800) numbers for each marketing activity. Whether you use a 1800 or 1300 number will depend on the country in which you’re running the business. They are usually about $20 or so dollars to set up and after that you’re only billed for calls received. If the traffic is light, the bill will be small (nothing to worry about). If you get a high volume of calls you will get a large bill but also lots of potential customers.

This way you’ll have a dedicated number for your yellow pages listing. So anyone who calls on that number definitely found you through the yellow pages. There is nowhere to hide. You’ll know exactly how much traffic your yellow pages listing generates, which in most cases won’t be a lot. Making the decision whether to sack the yellow pages an easy one.

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Tags: crm lead tracking, crm systems, yellow pages lead tracking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.