Posts Tagged ‘tracking sales’

Know Your Marketing Metrics!

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

I can’t stress enough that, if you are running online marketing campaigns, you have to track them for measuring success.  There is no excuse for any online marketer to not track their campaigns through either paid or free analytic software.  Google Analytics (/www.google.com/analytics)  is a free software that enables any marketer to see how well their Search campaign is going, as well as, other online campaigns.  What’s great about this software is that you can place a simple tracking code, provided by Google Analytics, on your website to see how specific campaigns are converting at your site, how users are interacting with the site, and if you have an e-commerce site, how well sales are converting.  Without knowing how new users and repeat users are interacting with your site, you won’t be able to know how to improve the user experience to increase registrant or sales conversions.

There is a down-side to Google Analytics, it has problems aggregating all of the traffic accurately for unique visitors and visits.  For example, if you are running a Facebook advertising campaign, Google statistically will show less traffic to your site, than what Facebook reports, but hey, what do you expect from a free software.

For a more robust analytic software, try WebTrends.  WebTrends can be customized to your needs and is very granular about its tracking. Keeping in mind, it is a paid software, but if you can afford it, I would highly recommend it. If you are running a Search campaign, you’ll be able to see, down to the keyword, if new registrants or sales can be accounted to those specific keywords.

Tracking your customers efficiently through CRM software

Friday, October 17th, 2008

You’ve launched your website, leads are contacting you through your online registration form successfully, but you can’t efficiently see how well your leads have sale closings.  What should you do?  Track them with CRM software. What is CRM software?

CRM is ‘Customer Relationship Management’ software that enables you to track customers thoroughly and see the cycle of prospect to lead to sale closings efficiently between your marketing and sales teams.  Many entrepreneurs and small companies believe that since they are small, that they are efficient in communicating between their departments, but they are wrong.  Small companies, sometime are worse that larger organizations in communicating, it’s just not as noticeable, until they start tracking for ROI growth and reviewing what direct marketing programs are working for lead generation programs.

To review clear sales user paths and improve customer satisfaction, check out a few CRM products.

Salesforce.com is one of the top CRM products on the market.  Salesforce.com has a 30-day free trial and has a pricing plan for any size company. If you are interested in having the CRM work with your current Outlook contacts, check out Prophet 5.0 (www.Avidian.com) , which has a 30 day money back guarantee and can be up and running in only a few minutes. Another good option is Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 4.0, which you can register for free to try the product.