One key element I’ve found that can be frequently overlooked in integrated marketing campaigns is the need to evaluate an effort full-scale, top to bottom, in order to identify what works and what doesn’t and to benchmark for future efforts. This is also crucial when it comes to calculating your true return on investment.
Calculating the results on a telemarketing campaign is relatively simple. When you factor in the efforts required to generate a lead (let alone a sale) from a fully integrated campaign, it gets a bit trickier. For example, for an email campaign, you’ll want to know where your email addresses came from; how many messages were sent, read, deleted, forwarded, or bounced; how many responders downloaded materials; how many of those responders were callable (i.e. provided sufficient information to be called). Of those called, obviously you’ll want to know how many were reached or not reached, and how many leads were generated. The ultimate accomplishment for many of our clients is to determine how many of those qualified leads closed and at what dollar value. Couple your email campaign with various direct mail efforts, in person or online events, and now social networking, and the waters get more muddied.
It crucial to appoint a point person to monitor and report on all quantifiable aspects of a campaign. This is a sensitive role, as it needs to be someone capable of interacting in an unbiased way with your sales team, your creative vendors and related contractors, etc. A full-scale analysis also requires detailed record keeping and reporting, along with trouble-shooting and forward-looking recommendations. At TeleNet, Program Managers, Account Executives, and IT Staff work together to accomplish this, but occasionally there are pieces of the puzzle that we aren’t able to fill in. In general though, we are often able to identify key areas of strength and weakness and make positive suggestions for future improvements. Even if you’re not outsourcing your telemarketing, consider contracting a third party vendor to run analysis and track metrics for your marketing dollars from the top down in order to determine the true return on your investments.