COVER CONTINUED ...
At the end of the day, this is work, and you’ll have a hard time outsourcing it, which can be a challenge. But this is the work that changes lives — most notably your own. This is work worth doing and doing right. This is worth rereading. Be sure you understand the details of what I wrote here, because I can assure you that your competitors don’t understand what you and I have just gone over. This fact will allow you to stay ahead of them and even eventually crush them (if you so desire). I’ll close with this thought: What is your company’s most valuable asset? It’s your customer and prospect database. Communicating with them, be it with a catalog, a newsletter, or smoke signals, providing them value, and reminding them who you are, what you do, and that you’re still in business, is the most profitable thing you can do. It is far easier to sell an existing customer something than it is to find a new customer. Don’t make the mistake that Victoria’s Secret did and assume that a hard-to-track campaign isn’t making you money. Don’t assume that everything is going digital, because it’s not — not even close. Be smarter than that. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Be smart about your tracking and invest in your foundations first, and I guarantee you will crush it. “... you need a system that allows you to ask for, reward, and communicate about referrals. You have to get this stuff right before you even think about more leads. THIS IS THE BACKBONE .”
the emails you send, or the lead magnet you gave them for opting in. The sign on the road that people pass by every day is connected to the postcards and direct mail pieces you send out and the phone calls you make. The person who answers your phones and makes an appointment is connected to all the marketing leading up to that point. It is all connected. This, though, creates another problem: What marketing should you do? You can’t do it all simply because it’s connected. But the answer is simple: You need to start with the fundamentals. First, determine what the overall goal of your marketing is. Is it lead generation, lead nurturing, customer service, upsells, retention, or referrals? It may be any combination of those things. Next, work on the foundational pieces: answering the phone, customer service, nurturing, retention, and referrals. The marketing that you need for this is typically phone and customer service training, email marketing, and newsletter marketing. Finally, you need a system that allows you to ask for, reward, and communicate about referrals. You have to get this stuff right before you even think about more leads. This is the backbone. You want to track individuals’ performances (on the phone and in customer service) and the campaigns (did we get referrals or not?), but you’re not trying to track any of the media specifically because it is not lead generation. If your emails aren’t getting a response, maybe they’re boring. If your referral program isn’t working, you’re likely being too cheap. You need to give a better gift and create a better experience, etc. These are the foundational pieces of your campaign. Once you have those few things on point, you can move on to lead generation. This is when we can get much more accurate tracking because we are asking it to bring in new leads. What you want to do here is track all the steps in the campaign, from lead generation to conversion. For example, if you generate a lead on Facebook, but to convert that lead you need to send emails and make phone calls, then Facebook is only one component. You may be getting amazing leads from Facebook, but the person making the phone calls sucks, and that’s the real reason your Facebook campaign isn’t working. But if you don’t look at it from the big-picture campaign standpoint, you may not see this. You’ll fall into the trap of looking at only the lead source and then make decisions based on bad data.
to Facebook. With last touch, the credit goes to the trade show or a phone call after the trade show. Neither of these are even close to being correct. It took dozens of touches for someone to become a customer. Now you may be saying, “Shaun, I don’t do lead generation or collect data until someone becomes a customer, so my tracking works.” We’ll need to talk about not doing any lead generation another time, but I do know that there are a number of businesses run by executives who think that’s just how it’s done in their industry. They’re being naive. All the research shows that, on average, people need to be exposed to you at least eight times before they even know you exist, which means they saw you in some way, shape, or form numerous times. But you couldn’t track what has now caused them to decide to do business with you. It’s this same bad logic and basic misunderstanding of how marketing works that caused the executives at Victoria’s Secret to cancel their catalogs and lose billions. I get this on the newsletter side all the time. Prospects misunderstand the purpose of a newsletter and want to turn it into some lead generation piece (which, nine times out of 10, is a bad idea). The goal of the newsletter isn’t typically to get people to read it cold when they have never heard of you before. For that to work, you better have some damn good stuff to say and some astounding offers to make. Ikea and Costco both send out a catalog, although Costco’s is more half-catalog, half-newsletter, but that’s not the point. In 2016, Ikea sent 213 million catalogs. In 2013 Costco sent over 103 million catalogs. They can’t track the ROI on those 100 percent, that’s for sure. And can you imagine what it costs to send 213 million Ikea catalogs? It has to be nearly two dollars per catalog, minimum. Hopefully I’ve educated and entertained you enough to keep you with me until this point in the article, because all of the examples and all of the facts have been building up to one word: You are shooting yourself in the foot by trying to track ROI on every transaction. You are hurting your own growth by not realizing that so much of your marketing is interconnected. Your newsletter is connected to the emails you send and to the reviews you get online. Facebook ads are connected to your website or landing page, Stop!
–Shaun
P.S. If you’re a publicly traded company executive who is reading this, and you plan on canceling your catalog like Victoria’s Secret did, please send me a copy of the press release at Shaun.Buck@ thenewsletterpro.com the day you publish it. I’d love to short your stock and make another killing. My family and I will thank you.
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