Thursday 19 June 2014

Evaluate The Marketing Channels You Use

There are so many possibilities to gain new leads for your sales department, just think about the multitude of marketing channels at your disposal: email marketing, telemarketing, direct mailing, social media, online advertising and so many others. You probably already use some, but which marketing channel generates more conversions, brings back most revenues and is better fitted for your company? If you could answer this question, directing the marketing budget towards the right channels will be a piece of cake.

Let's see how Zimplu CRM can help you in this particular matter. To illustrate, we created a dummy database:

First, we’ll add a custom field for Opportunities, with a few options available and only one possible choice. These options should include all the marketing channels used to promote your company’s products / services towards prospects. As you can see, we selected direct mailing, fairs, internet marketing, referrals and telemarketing.
Custom field with multiple single options
When a sales representative creates an opportunity, this field should be completed based on the answer the prospect offers when he is asked about his source of information regarding your company.

Now that the custom field was created, it should be completed every time, no exceptions admitted. Furthermore, we must create a Filter to see all the won opportunities for each marketing channel, just like it is shown below.
Filter database in Zimplu
We named this filter "Internet Marketing Revenues" and we chose to see only the won opportunities in the last 30 days, for the internet marketing channel.

Now we can see all the opportunities matching the conditions above.
all the won opportunities from internet marketing activities
We can now export this list to excel, where we can make further calculations like total revenues, profit and ROI for the internet marketing channel.

Apply the filter for every marketing channel you use and you’ll be able to decide, based on real data, which one is more effective in your case.