One of the most important steps in your prospecting efforts is to establish a means to measure your results and monitor your progress.
This will let you know if your sales campaign is effective or if you’re wasting time and if so, in what areas.
Who knows, maybe you have a fantastic sales letter and package, but your response contact information is not correct.
People may be calling your neighbors! Or maybe you thought you purchased a list of Senior leads to mail to targeted elderly people in the community, but you instead received & targeted a list of Seniors in High School instead. Any number of things could have gone wrong.
One way to measure results is to set up a unique web site to target a direct response from your letter. Set up a counter and use a host who has web statistics so you can check daily or weekly to see who visited your website.
Statistics can also tell how long visitors were at your site, which pages they viewed, what order they surfed and much more. Take time to study these statistics on a regular basis. Things change. For instance, you may have a couple of links set up for visitors to click through, but maybe one is broken or not accessible for awhile because the server is down.
If surfers can’t keep moving and clicking, you’ll lose them. They don’t want to wait for long downloads, wade through broken links & figure out how to get back. So test your site and stats. Find out if you’re losing anyone on page two or the home page right off. And make adjustments. Internet means Immediate – so make changes!
You could also set up an access code entry on a web page and mail potential clients a “Secret Code.” They can enter your site, say by giving you their e-mail address (for further contact) and their secret code, then be rewarded with a free report to download. A free ebook about you and your products or with industry news would be great, too.
Outside of the virtual world, you can measure results, too. Setup an 800-phone number just for your next campaign. See how many responses you get and where they come from. Caller ID can help identify people for you.
Have your readers request a fax. Or set up a Fax On Demand. Several fax companies even offer free or inexpensive plans like eFax.com or Send2Fax.com. Measure responses by the requests. A bonus for you: you’ll have another channel for follow up – THEIR fax number!