We asked Robert Pifke, chief marketing officer at Real Property Management, “What analytics are you using to improve your marketing?” Here’s what he had to say.
The most important metrics for marketing should be cost per lead and cost per sale. Cost per lead is the media cost divided by the number of legitimate leads. Cost per sale is the media cost divided by the number of actual sales achieved through those media.
Our research indicates that the vast majority of property owners use the Internet to find and assess potential property managers before contacting them. With that in mind, another set of online metrics used includes incremental web traffic and web leads. Leads can be telephone calls to an office or completed web forms from a website.
For offline media such as direct mail, radio, outdoor, or television, similar measures are used: the number of direct prospect calls, website traffic, and secondary calls or web form lead submissions to an office.
Website traffic should be measured by Google Analytics or other analytic tools, and call tracking services should be used to monitor calls. Naturally, separate call tracking numbers and landing pages need to be established for each medium so the results can be isolated.
Secondary measures can be useful to improve traffic and lead metrics but are often incorrectly used as goals unto themselves. Organic rankings, social shares, bounce rate, number of website page views, and other measures should be used as a means to an end (traffic and leads). These measures are properly used to determine how to increase traffic and leads, and nothing more.
One thing that is relevant for franchise sales is mention of a CRM system. This makes it infinitely easier to track results by medium. Portal leads can be easily set up to immediately get into a CRM system. Once in the system, email marketing, and sales force effectiveness can be monitored. For example, what is the sales conversion rate for different salespeople? How quickly was the lead responded to by a salesperson?
Secondary measures for email include open rates, spam designation count and percentage, and click-through rates. Again, these measures can help make the messages more effective in getting leads and sales and are not means unto themselves.
This article was originally published in the Franchising Update section on Franchising.com
