Are you tracking your leads properly…?

Are you running an email marketing campaign, and trying to attract new subscribers? Are you tracking your leads properly?  If you are thinking yes, then you should be able to track your lead back to the original source.  There is a simple way to do this, then there is a more complicated way – if you are using multi-channel marketing analysis. But wait… there’s more – much more….

IM Catalyst Motto: “Scrutinize, Analyze, Optimize  [look, learn, tweak!]”

Why bother to track your leads?  The obvious answer is that you need to know how they found your site so you can determine hows best to spend your time and money attracting new people to help (do business with), but that is not enough.  You need to know what they do after they found you too, in fact this can be more important!  It is no use having a subscriber unless you are exchanging value with them.  Now, that can take many forms, even if they don’t buy from you.  For example they could be your biggest and loudest fan and they might be shepparding hoards of new customers to you.  But for now, let’s just look at the typical exchange of value – i.e. your subscriber becomes a customer and they buy something.

Here’s why:- what good is it if a particular advert is driving lots of traffic to your opt-in pages and is generating you boat loads of new subscribers, if they don’t buy anything?  So you must monitor where the buyers are coming from – this will allow you to work out the revenue per channel (by channel I mean advertising medium, youtube, facebook, banner ads, etc).  Once you have this data for all of your advertising and marketing efforts you can figure out which channel is best converting leads into customers – we could all do with more customers, right?  But more than that, you can figure out which channels are weakest.

It would be a very bad idea simply to focus on the best channels at the exclusion of all else.  Why? Because things change – remember pop-up adds!  They once ruled – and now they are gone!  So you need to focus on all your channels.  I identify the weakest.  What is wrong – do you have landing page disconnect, which in summary means that the advert indicated one thing and visitor feels that they were offered something else?  They were lied to!  This can have an effect on any part of your sales process… the opt-in form, the email follow up sequence, the free gift or in fact the products that you are offering.  So it is hyper important that you are clear on what you are offering, how it can help, and make sure that it delivers.  By looking at your weakest channels you might be able to detect some “disconnect” and fix it to make them stronger – it is worth spending some time on this.

To help you figure out what is going on, you need to track your sales funnel.  There are many ways to do this, Google Analytics is a good way, but most good paid email providers also provide tracking codes and these can be very powerful in improving your profits.