There an old adage that goes, “You waste half your advertising budget. The problem is you don’t know which half.” However, technology makes tracking each of your sales back to the ad that inspired it possible. And when you can attribute sales to advertisements and marketing programs you use, you can know which programs to expand and which to cut.

By paying attention to how your customers find you, you can track the revenue, profitability, and return on investment of your marketing and advertising efforts. By doing this, it is possible to get a strong understanding of the comparative effectiveness of all your marketing programs.

To start figuring out what ads are producing the most sales, you need to tag each person that calls you with how they found out about you. Sometimes the way they hear about you will be obvious, like when they bring in your newspaper ad or door hanger coupon. Most time, however, this will require you to ask how they heard about you. It should be part of the regular routine for each new person that calls.

Tagging your prospects and customers

Most customer managements systems have a place to mark a customer’s lead source.

These codes can track the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns if they are associated with the customer’s record or the dispatch. With that kind of association, the code of the way the customer found you can be applied to their dispatch or invoices so you can see how much revenue and profit came from each of your ad programs in a given time period.

It’s important to come up with specific codes with meaningful descriptions for your various marketing programs so that you can clearly identify which campaign to attribute revenue.

For example, if you had a monthly door hanger campaign, you could code the January campaign as DOOR1.

These codes should not just be used and then discarded. Deleting codes will make it impossible to see how much revenue (or lack thereof) could be attributed to that marketing program.

Analyze the results

Another important component of identifying how customers found you is to analyze how much each lead source contributes in revenue for a given period of time. This information is vital to discovering opportunities to expand in certain areas of your marketing and advertising mix and what areas you should cut.

You should report on and compare the volume of sales attached to each of your marketing campaigns or advertisements. This is the only way to know which ones are effective and which are now.

With a detailed analysis you will be able to see the number of invoices attached to each code for the time period, and also shows the total sales dollars and percentage of total dollar sales for each code, allowing you to identify your most profitable types of sales.

Click on the image to see a larger version:

This is one effective way to make decisions about which advertising programs to expand or retract.

How do you decide what advertising and marketing programs are working? What measurements do you use?

Have you ever wanted to store vital information about a piece of equipment only to find that ESC does not have a field for it?  How about grouping equipment by a piece of information?  Or finding all customers that have equipment in poor condition?  If so, ESC has the perfect solution for this: custom fields.

Not only can custom fields help you do all these things it also gives you the following abilities:

• Custom fields can be easily viewed from the Qualification screen in ESC.
• Equipment reports can be filtered by custom fields.
• Custom fields can be configured to print on dispatch tickets.
• Custom fields can be seen on all mobile devices.

To set up a custom field go to the File pull-down menu and selectSetup Custom Fields followed by Equipment. You can then define up to eight custom equipment fields.  To create one, enter the name of the custom field in the Field Label column. Use the fields to the right to populate a drop down list that can be selected when this field is used.

In this example I have setup a custom field called Condition that we will use to track the shape of our customer’s equipment.  We have added 5 items to the pull-down menu: Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor and Bad.

Note that any setups and changes to these fields on this screen will affect all equipment for all customers.  The fields that are set up here, and the List Items that are defined for each of those Field Labels, will appear on ALL customers’ equipment screens.

The custom fields you define will now appear on the Enter/Modify Equipment screen.  To use custom fields, simply recall a piece of equipment and select the value from the drop down list in the field you created. If the value you want to use doesn’t exist in the list you can manually enter the information directly into this field instead. For ease of searching and consistency, we suggest using the defined list items whenever possible.

As noted earlier, custom fields can be viewed from the Customer Qualification screen.  This is extremely useful as the Customer Qualification screen is the crux of ESC and provides useful information for whatever Customer/Location you choose.  The Equipment section can be found starting halfway down the screen and has a series of columns that help you organize information about customer equipment.  Custom fields are located on the far right of this list, but can be moved to a more prominent location by dragging the title of the chosen Custom Equipment Field to wherever you would like it to be.  This change will be reflected on every screen where equipment is displayed.

By Justin Egan