To determine if your company’s marketing campaign is successful, it is most useful to gather and analyze data pertaining to your customers and their habits. This can be gathered in several different ways.
Website traffic analysis
Any successful business should have a website these days, even if you don’t do business directly through it. Of course, it is a good option to allow customers not only to learn more about your product, but also to make purchases via your website with a credit card. Many types of shopping cart software are available, and most of these allow for easy tracking of customer habits. Not only do they tell you what the customer bought, they can also tell you which other items they have viewed without buying.
Likewise, you can also track where a customer came from using link tracking codes or web analyzers included in many website hosting packages. These will often tell you what site or page the customer came from, what the last page on your site they looked at was, and how many hits any page has gotten. Use this data to see which sites bring you the most customers, and put more of your advertising on sites that generate the most web traffic for you. Affiliate links can be used in the same way: using tracking codes to see what sites are bringing you the most money, and where click-throughs are coming from.
Customer surveys
You can and should gather some data from offline as well. This can be done in a number of ways. If you get into printing brochures and send them out with your customer’s purchase, you can enclose a prepaid postcard asking questions about customer satisfaction, what sorts of products they would like to see, how they learned about your products, and much more. Sometimes these will just get discarded, so it is useful to offer an incentive like a promotional offer or coupon to encourage customers to fill them out and return them. Even if most of them are not returned, the information you receive from those you do receive can be very valuable to your marketing strategy.
Online surveys can be placed on websites with form software or sent through email. Though customers may ignore these, they are inexpensive ways to gather information.
Analyzing your data
To determine if the campaign is successful, you must know what you mean by success. If you want to reach more customers in a certain location, or to improve profits by a certain margin, you can judge your success by analyzing the data you have collected. If you reached your goals, you know that your campaign has been successful and you should continue doing things in the same way. Even if your campaign is not successful, and you have not reached your targeted customers or increased profits, the data you collect can be extremely helpful in improving your marketing strategy. Eliminate the strategies that are not working for you or costing too much money and focus on the methods that are most effective.
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