The first thing I’d like to mention is that I fully understand that the form from my last article will NOT work for everyone. If you have a very busy retail outlet with lots of people crowding through at the same time, or if you handle large volumes of phone calls, etc, that particular tracking form isn’t going to be overly practical. So, a short cut for those of you in these situations is to simply rephrase a common question.
Don’t ask “How did you learn about my business.” Put simply, the answer to this question cannot be trusted.
Instead, unless you already “know” the answer, your first question should be “Is this your first time doing business with us?” If they say “no”, terrific, welcome them back and mark off on a sheet behind the counter/desk that they are a repeat customer. If they say “yes”, then the question you really want to ask is “Wonderful, did you hear about us from someone you know, or did you see one of our advertisements, or did you see our sign and decide to pop in?” This question gives you much stronger information to analyze. After religiously asking this question for a period of time, you are going to see numbers that will tell you what percentage of your customers are:
- Repeat business
- Referrals from other people
- Customers driven by your advertising/marketing
- Customers attracted by your location/signage
At the end of the day, all of your customers will fall into one of these categories. For most of you, chances are that the results of this exercise will actually surprise you. One week from today I’m going to send out a request to everyone here. My request will be to post a comment on my blog sharing what the percentages are for the four categories above. There is no “confidential” information divulged in percentages, but by having multiple businesses share this information it can be a huge help to other businesses who may be struggling with a certain category or it may offer a peace of mind that they are more in line with other businesses than they thought they were. I hope you’ll choose to participate.
So yes, this is the beginning. Why? Because until you understand what category your customers fall in to by percentages, how can you even begin to know what you need to track, test and measure? For that matter, how can you know what exactly you should be marketing? This is a much easier question to ask, it is a much easier question for the customers to answer and it is often more accurate. Most people can recall “generalities”… ie: “I remember someone told me about this place.” Or “I remember seeing some kind of ad, or hearing something.” But they often have a harder time remembering “who” told them or “where” they saw or heard something.
At the end of the week you should have the following information:
# % Repeat business
# % Referrals from other people
# % Customers driven by your advertising/marketing
# % Customers attracted by your location/signage
HINT: Keep a small sign near your cash register or phone to remind yourself and/or your staff what the two key questions are: 1) Is this your first time doing business with us? If yes, then 2) “Wonderful, did you hear about us from someone you know, or did you see one of our advertisements, or did you see our sign and decide to pop in?” It's also important to phrase this question in a way that is natural for each person asking it in order for it to flow and to actually get asked.
What this particular method of tracking won’t do for you is specifically tell you “which” of your ads are yielding the most results. But in reality, tracking is such a detailed, multi-level thing and can be extremely costly the more you break it down. Plus, if it isn’t done correctly it can return such erroneous results as to be useless. So don’t be in a hurry to get ahead of yourself. Take things one step at a time and watch the picture that develops, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you learn.
Tomorrow I’m going to take a break from discussing tracking, although a very valuable topic that more businesses should spend more time understanding, there are other aspects of your marketing that you can and should be working on while you’re getting your tracking working for you.
ps: if you ever need any of the forms or documents I link with my articles, or if you want a PDF version, you can get them through our website at this link:
http://www.gatewaygazettegroup.com/New/resources.html
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