How does all this connect to web marketing? Simple–the criteria you apply to leads should be the same anywhere. The data you seek to add to a simple response informs and drives your web efforts. The care and feeding of the resultant leads is how you turn web impressions into sales, and it’s how you track results of web campaigns through to sales, and more importantly, how you get an early measure of success or failure so you know where and what to tweak in your campaigns.
Its how you get to “show them the money”.
It’s also how you do the back end of cross-media analysis. I’ve seen and participated in a lot of attempts to do cross-media analysis, and most of it suffers from being a bit soft. You run a TV ad and measure a spike in web hits from people who remember the URL, in inbound calls from people who remember the phone number, and web search from people who don’t remember either. That’s swell, but how do you relate the value of that response? Lead grade, pure and simple. Get the leads qualified and you can estimate the ultimate return on investment with good accuracy.
For pure web transactions it’s fairly easy to connect marketing effort to purchase, especially if the purchase also happens on the web. For shorter time-frame transactions likely to occur on the one computer it’s simple to place a cookie on the respondents machine that you pick back up when they complete the transaction. Failing that you also generally have a highly unique identifier available in the email address. This enables a precision in the connection between cause and effect that is both wonderful and dangerous. The danger is that only the efforts that result in immediate ROI are continued. That’s the small end of the funnel again. You can only gain limited traction there.
What happened to all the lead generation expertise? On the web people believe far too much in self service, direct metrics and the long tail. People clicked on this, and then later they bought. That’s great, now how do you expand that effort to people who aren’t looking for your product? An undisciplined marketing effort can be profitable only if it’s cheap. That’s just not good enough.
To truly optimize the results of marketing you need to address the entire funnel, and to optimize the funnel you need to perfect your hand off to sales. Let’s talk about how that should happen and the relationship you need to have with the sales force.