Whether you want to grow your business larger or keep it the size it is now, your goal should always be to generate more profit from the revenue you bring in—and to find other low-cost, minimal-effort income streams that can bring in additional profits for you. In every business, there is a checklist of goals and targets that—when reached, surpassed and improved upon—continually drives revenue into the business and drives up profits. We call these targets “critical drivers.” To an insurance agent, critical drivers might be “number of cross-sells per customer” or “revenue per agent” or “amount required to trigger bonuses and overrides.”  For retailers, a critical driver may be “revenue per square foot.” But from a marketing standpoint, the critical drivers of any business are things like number of new leads, response rate, number of unique website visitors, cart conversions, open rate, and more.  In this issue of the Revenue Report newsletter, I want to inspire you to identify, track, measure and meet the critical marketing drivers of your business.

The First Question to Ask: Are You Minding Your Metrics?

In every small business, there are “key profitability indicators”—information you need to know in order to decide if a particular income-generation activity is profitable and therefore worth continuing, expanding, or canceling altogether. You can only get this information via regular reports produced from systems and procedures that you set up to give you that information.  With this sort of system, you can tell immediately whether a certain marketing campaign worked, whether your sales scripts are working, if it’s better to bundle a product package together using three items or six items, whether your emails are being opened and acted upon, and so on.  (An example of a helpful system that gives you data is Google Analytics, linked to your website so it will automatically deliver data to you. An example of a procedure are weekly reports from the Sales Department detailing number of leads generated, contacted and converted.) Critical drivers are those numbers that give you an instant snapshot of whether your income generation efforts are working — or need to be improved. When you manage your business against these critical drivers, your sole focus becomes tracking them, improving upon them, and motivating your staff to surpass them.

Five Easy Measurements That Provide Information on Critical Drivers

While it does take some work to set-up measuring methods, the pay-off is enormous in terms of information you’ll gather which can help you shape your future marketing campaigns — and manage your staff to meet and surpass critical drivers.  Here are the five most important measurements you’ll need to track:

1. Monitoring Leads, New Customers and Sales by Product or Product Bundle—Even if you monitor no other numbers in your business, you must at least track the number of leads you bring in, the number of new customers you produce and the number of sales you get paid for—week by week.

2. Gathering Key Information from Your Website—Google Analytics, a free service, can help you easily gather important data in just minutes, including:  web traffic, opt-ins at your home page, cart conversions (sales through your shopping cart), and cart abandons (visitors who begin a purchase but do not complete it).

3. Calculating Response Rates and Conversion Rates by Marketing Campaign—In order to calculate response rates for each individual marketing campaign you run—a display advertisement, a teleseminar, or an insert in someone else’s shipping carton, for instance—you’ll need to know which promotional campaign each response comes from.  It’s easy to add a tracking code on the coupon, use a unique toll-free (800) number for each campaign (that’s captured by your phone staff), or have your inbound salespeople or in-store clerks simply ask the prospect how they heard about you.  (These are strategies for offline prospecting campaigns.  All response tracking at your website is done by your shopping cart software.) Once you know where leads are coming from, you can begin to calculate the response rate, return on expenditure and other critical information.

4. Measuring the Results of Your Email Marketing—Once you are capturing email addresses from visitors to your website, you’ll want to promote future products and services to those names via email.  To become a master email marketer, start tracking the numbers related to your list along with the rate at which your opt-ins open and act upon their emails. Regularly measure your list size, open rate of emails sent, click rate (which means clicking a link in your email to view an offer at a webpage), and bounce rate (emails returned to you due to bad addresses).

5. Tracking Your Telemarketing Results—If you sell expensive products or services and use salespeople to follow-up with leads generated from your prospecting campaigns, you likely know already that monitoring these salespeople is the key to increasing sales.  Continually measure: (1) Leads available to call, (2) leads reached, (3) leads sold into a primary product offer, (4) leads down sold into a less expensive package, and (5) leads not closed into any purchase.

Start Measuring Just One Critical Driver

Choose at least one of the key indicators above and set-up a method for measuring it—whether that method is paper reports your salespeople complete OR Google Analytics tied to your website OR another choice of the five measurements above. Of course, “Managing Against Critical Drivers” is just one of the business-building topics that I’ve included in my Income:Series of planned-for-you monthly marketing campaigns. Others in the series include finding new customers, setting up your Internet Selling System (instead of just a brochure website), social media marketing, email campaigns, quarterly planning… plus so much more.  These are the exact sequence of campaigns that I would execute for you if your company were a high-end client of mine. Click here to get started with “Finding New Customers”—your first month—at the introductory price of just $3.95. Until next week, Janet Switzer P.S. If you need more than just a monthly campaign…if you literally want to transform your small business into a well-managed cash-flow machine…I’ve recently developed a packaged course that will help you easily execute pre-scheduled marketing campaigns, run advertising that makes the phone ring, implement sales strategies that convert prospective customers to cash-paying buyers and more.  This step-by-step training course helps you put in place those systems that reliably generate cash-flow. You can even “hand off” the work of establishing these systems to your staff or virtual assistant since the course includes complete tutorials, sample promotional pieces, a deal-making grid for your staff, easy-to-follow worksheets to help you plan, even hiring scripts for bringing different professionals into your business who can be responsible for bringing in the cash. For full details and to immediately get your copy of this ground-breaking course, click here.

Today, I want to help you establish System #3: Your Online Prospecting Platform and Website Marketing Path

Most business owners understand the need for a website, but all too few understand what a website is really supposed to do. Your website is a delivery vehicle for your message, just like newspaper ads, postcards, telemarketing or direct-mail packages. And like those other devices, the Internet has its own checklist of requirements you must follow to make any campaign a success. Your website must convince visitors to provide their name, email address and other identifying information in order to access a free buyer’s guide, online tutorial, downloadable checklist, subscription to valuable information, evaluation, self-audit or other instant giveaway that has value. The format of your giveaway item doesn’t matter—whether PDF, audio MP3 or other format—just as long as it can be easily opened, read, listened to, viewed or otherwise used by the people who opt-in at your site to get it. It should be downloadable at your website to keep your delivery costs at zero. And it must be compelling.

These days, convincing visitors to opt-in isn’t as easy as it used to be—mainly because registrants know they’ll be emailed advertisements and promotions later. You need to provide a tangible benefit in return. Even giving things away for free requires a persuasive and specific offer. “We have great prices!” is not an offer. Similarly, “27 years in business!” is not an offer. And “Sign up for our newsletter” has not worked as an offer for at least a few years. An easy way to create a compelling offer is to start with a persuasive headline about the giveaway item they’ll be downloading for free. Then, using direct-response style marketing language, describe the actual item they’ll receive, detail the benefits of instantly downloading it, and tell why you’re providing it free. Finally, this offer on your homepage should close with a simple opt-in form and give visitors exact instructions for completing the form—along with your promise that they’ll receive their information instantly. Once visitors fill in the form and hit the “Submit” button, two things should happen: (1) Their contact information should be collected into a database linked to the opt-in form, and (2) Visitors should be taken to a simple thank-you page that confirms they’ve opted in successfully and tells them how to download the free giveaway item. At the same time your visitor is accessing the free giveaway, your database should immediately begin delivering every 2-3 days (for a fixed period of time) a series of pre-written generic messages. Within these messages should be other helpful information. Then, starting with the 5th or 6th message, they should contain marketing copy about the first product or service you plan to sell to your visitors who opted-in. Later, you can offer other products, more services, and new offerings. Taking visitors through a compelling opt-in on the homepage, selling them an easy-to-buy first purchase a few webpages later, following up with other compelling offers on subsequent webpages, and reconnecting via a logical series of emailed offers days and weeks later is called a marketing path. What are the steps for setting up YOUR Internet prospecting system (or adding one to your current website)?

Five Easy Steps…With Tremendous Long-Term Pay-Off

Building a customized Internet selling infrastructure that’s actually designed to capture leads—then migrate them to a first sale—is simple when you consider there are really only five steps:

Step 1: Draw on paper a visual marketing path for your website that starts with an opt-in offer, then migrates visitors to a sales letter, then upsells them on other products. Your drawing will probably look like this one. You’ll be creating the webpages you need from your drawing. Step 2: Sign up for a shopping-cart service which not only captures visitor data via opt-ins, but also facilitates sales of both your entry-level and advanced products and services. (Click here for my favorite, economical shopping cart service.) Step 3: Build your webpages and link their featured opt-in forms and products for sale to your shopping cart’s name-capture and buyer’s databases. Step 4: Write a series of emails that can be programmed and automatically sent by the shopping cart to visitors who opt-in at your site. This re-captures the interest of visitors who leave without buying. (To receive my pre-programmed series of Instant Income autoresponder emails, opt-in here.) Step 5: Eventually, you’ll also want to create an affiliate recruitment and marketing system — including an affiliate recruitment webpage, affiliate registration function, online affiliate support center, and affiliate marketing tools — all managed by the shopping cart and designed to convince other list owners, website owners, bloggers, and endorsers to promote your goods and services to their customers through links at their site and emails to their list.

Executing the above steps is, admittedly, a lot of work. But it’s also worth it to you in increased lead-generation and revenue for your business. Plus, once this aspect of your website is operational, you can drive Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media followers to your site and send them through a path that prompts them to BUY.

This Week’s Homework Assignment

Begin the process by doing three things:

1. Draw your marketing path on paper (see the sample above).
2. Determine what your opt-in offer will be whether a free report, buyer’s guide, online tutorial, downloadable checklist, subscription to valuable information, evaluation, self-audit or other instant giveaway that has value.
3. Recruit a webmaster or HTML programmer to build the new webpages you need. You don’t have to hire an expensive graphic designer—in fact, because they’re usually not marketers, designers are notorious for adding unnecessarily elaborate elements that actually detract from the “compellingness” of the offer on the page.

Of course, if you need step-by-step guidance in developing your online prospecting platform and website marketing path, click below to get my comprehensive Internet marketing plan designed to give you the soup-to-nuts task list and tutorials for converting your website into one that resolutely migrates visitors from opting-in to buying an entry-level product or service to buying even more expensive products and services later. With the right kinds of offers and marketing path at your website, your website can turn from a mere “brochure site” into a true money-maker for your business—regardless of whether you’re a consultant, service provider, retailer or other kind of bricks-and-mortar business owner. Of course, this 59-page Internet marketing plan is in addition to what you’ll receive every month from my new subscription service which delivers planned-for-you marketing campaigns (at a very low cost) to help you execute revenue-producing campaigns, new-customer-acquisition strategies, media activity, customer relationship campaigns and more. Click: http://www.instantincome.com/marketing-plan/?page_id=1229 These campaigns are easy to integrate into your business… are instantly actionable without a lot of advance work… and require just a few hours (or less) to review, understand and execute (either by yourself or by a staff person)… Plus, they’re planned for you and delivered in exacting detail. They can be yours every month for less than the cost of lunch at your favorite restaurant or 7 minutes on the phone with an accountant or attorney. Click below to get started with “Finding New Customers”—your first month—at the introductory price of just $3.95. I’ll be back next week with details about the next Income System. http://www.instantincome.com/marketing-plan/?page_id=1229 Until next week, Janet Switzer Editor, Instant Income Revenue Report photo credit: SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent)