So you’ve posted some direct mail, sent an email campaign or completed a leaflet drop, that’s it now, right? Wrong, you’ve only just begun, it’s now time for stage 3 – Measuring. Lets start by thinking about your current strategy –

Do you measure your marketing?

How accurate is the method?

Does everyone in business do it?

How do you record it?

If you don’t know what has / hasn’t worked then how can you improve the next time? Measuring is often overlooked as a marketing tool but it’s an absolutely vital one to continued success. A survey last year by Omniture suggested that 55 percent of respondents cannot effectively measure marketing ROI, so although it is not easy you need to make sure that you put good processes in place to maximise how you measure.

The way in which you measure your marketing mainly depends on the delivery tool used or the call to action deployed, online marketing gives you the most access to data, for example e-shots can be measured using analytical software which gives you stats galore such as who opened it, which links were clicked and much more, or if your call to action is to drive to your website (best done through a specific URL for each campaign) then you can then use your own web analytics, such as google, to follow the traffic.

However if the delivery method was offline or the call to action was a telephone call or visit to premises then you need to put a process in place that you and all your staff follow (you need to make sure you have a complete internal buy in, so make sure you explain what you are doing and why), this doesn’t need to be complicated why not set up a specific telephone number, ask them to bring in a voucher, quote a promo code, in fact often it is just a question which results in callers / visitors telling you how they heard of your business.

But this only tackles those who responded, what about measuring the effectiveness to the remaining people? Often a simple follow up to a section of the marketing will give you incredibly valuable information, by calling a sample you can often find out if they received it, did they read it, did they understand it and were they likely to respond – all data which is vital for next time.

Once all this data has been received then you need to make sure you record it, there are hundreds of CRM systems available from low cost simple solutions right the way through to high end bespoke software, I would suggest you invest in one that gives you the ability to record all the relevant data for your business depending on what you want out of it. From a marketing point of view you would want one that not only allows you to record but also allows you to download, and ideally manipulate, the data to find patterns. But more about that in stage 4 – Reviewing!