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When it comes to marketing ROI, you have to realize that the term means Return OnInvestment and the return is measured in dollars (or your local currency). Let s sayyou spend $2,000 to get out a bulk mailing of 5,000 pieces and you get 10 calls as aresult. Doesn t look like much. But of these 10 calls you close 6 and get immediatesales of $12,000. That s marketing ROI! And that s not even taking into account thefuture sales to those 6 new customers. It could add up to hundreds of thousands ofdollars.
The same simple mathematics apply to any other marketing efforts: radio ads, pressreleases or articles in magazines, print ads, yellow pages, web site, etc.
Obviously you need to keep track of response from each marketing campaign you do sothat you can weed out unsuccessful campaigns and strengthen successful ones.
Case in point:
Jeff Lee, CFO of a very successful consulting company, Measurable Solutions, has adopted a successful small businessmarketing strategy based on direct mail marketing. Key elements are mailing out anewspaper and full color postcards. The design is done in house and the printing andmailing is done by a specialized postcard printing company. In his own words...
We get our best response from mailing out a newspaper and back it up withpostcards. Depends on the postcards. Some postcards have pulled well than others.
The professionalism of the postcards is something that is effective: it getsattention, it keeps the image that we want to keep, it creates the reach, and itcreates the response and keeps our leads in a very high range.
We probably average around 7,500 post cards per week. Out of 7,500 post cards we llget in an average of 15-20 leads. Of the 15-20 leads at least a third of them cometo our introductory seminar. So say 5 or 7 people show up and they pay $1,700 apiece. Off of that we close a further $30-40,000 for services.
The money we have put into the postcards is like a drop in a bucket compared towhat we get back. We know that the more promotion we send out, the more return we regoing to get. It always works.
That is excellent marketing ROI. Measurable Solutions spend about $2,275 for 7,500 full color post cards. Thatincludes printing, postage, mailing (including the mailing list). From that they getbetween $8,500 and $11,900 in immediate response for an introductory seminar andadditional $30-40,000 follow-up sales.
Spend $2,275, earn $40-50,000. You don t need to have majored in advanced math androcket science to work that one out: that is what is meant by marketing ROI! Results of direct mail marketing vary from business to business but the principleholds and always works: if you send out enough promotion, you will make sales andmaximize your marketing ROI. Don t worry about response rate if your marketing ROIis high.
