subject: Does Yellow Pages Advertising Still Work? Find Out With Crm Systems [print this page] Do you measure the effectiveness your offline marketing activities? It's okay, no need to be embarrassed, most business owners don't. However without this vital information you could be throwing away good money on multiple marketing strategists that just don't work for you. And in today's economy waste cannot be tolerated, to stay alive every dollar counts.
When it comes to marketing waste, Yellow Pages is a repeat offender. But before we move onto discussing the pro's and con's of the yellow pages it's important to understand the mechanics of marketing data.
You might be wondering what's the best way to get started and how difficult it is to start tracking the success of each marketing campaign. It will depend on what kind of systems you use. Trying to track the source of new clients manually using spreadsheets and log books takes up valuable staff time. Manual data also doesn't translate into meaningful statistics easily. What is the point in collecting data if it can't be used to indentify trends in your marketing returns?
CRM systems make tracking and interpreting marketing data simple and easy.
So what are CRM systems? CRM is short for customer relationship management software. These programs store and manage important customer information, including the source of each new customer. Once you have recorded where each new customer came from you can also use the charting and forecasting tools to measure the success of past marketing campaigns and predict their future potential with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Now when it comes to online activities (such as people who come to your site from the online yellow pages directory) finding out where the customer came from is easy. Most new CRM systems have web integration capabilities. So they can track the source of any new clients who come through your website (or websites) and automatically update your database accordingly.
Offline activities is where it gets tricky. If everyone calls you through your main telephone number separating the source of new customers becomes difficult. If you ask people where they heard about you it can break the flow of the sale. Staff will also forget to ask or forget to enter the answer into your CRM. Meaning you'll end up with patchy and incomplete data.
The simple solution is using dedicated 1300 (or 1800) numbers for each individual marketing activity. The type of number you use will vary according to what country your from and you can also choose between numbers that only cost the caller the price of a local call (1300 numbers usually) and numbers that are totally free for the caller (1800 lines). In either case the numbers are usually about $20 or so dollars to set up and after that you only pay based on the actual volume of calls placed.
This way you'll have a dedicated number for your yellow pages listing. So anyone who calls on that number definitely found you through the yellow pages. There is nowhere to hide. You'll know exactly how much traffic your yellow pages listing generates, which in most cases won't be a lot. Making the decision whether to sack the yellow pages become very straight forward.
