Where Do Your Customers Come From?

How to keep Track of Phone and Email Enquiries

When you receive a phone call or email into your business, it is vitally important to track the original source. Tracking of all your marketing activities is absolutely crucial. Once you know what is working and what isn’t you can reallocate your marketing activity for maximum effect.

If you have Google analytics installed into your website you are provide with a fantastic tool to tell you what is going on there. But and yes, this could be a big one. Analytics doesn’t tell you if a prospective client rang your phone number from your call to action in your websites description. Because they can do this without even clicking on your website!  If they send you an email from your website, you can set up goals to measure this. I like to set up a goal as reaching the thank you page for this purpose. But once again analytics does not tell you if a customer decided to call your business from the phone number they got off the website.

The challenge seems to be figuring out where your phone call enquiries come from. There are several ways you can monitor this. The most effective, fool proof way is to have a separate telephone number for different marketing activities. One for leaflets, one for advertising in local press, and another for your website. Each month you can get an itemised bill which will show the volume of calls received from each marketing source. The second and cheaper alternative is to ask everyone who calls where they got your number today. Then log them all on a simple tally chart like this.

Day/Source	Leaflets	Press	Website	Word of Mouth	Saw Van
Monday	II	I	IIII	I
Tuesday	I	I	III		I
Wednesday	II	I	IIII	I
Thursday			IIII	II
Friday	II		IIIII II	I

A more comprehensive method of tracking would be the use of a sales funnels like this one:

Name/Source/Action	Source	Enquiry	Follow Up 1	Follow Up 2	Sale
Mrs Smith	Website	Phone			£59.99
Mr Brown	Leaflet	Email	28 Jun 13	1 Jul 13
Miss Jones	WOM	Phone	28 Jun 13		£215.00
Mr Black	Website	Email	29 Jun 13	3 Jul 13	£87.49
Mrs White	Press	Email	1 Jul 13	4 Jul 13

Using these simple tools will make your business more profitable! Without them you will never know where your customers are coming from, and by association you will not know where your profits come from either.

Duncan is an Entrepreneur with specialist skills in website design, search engine optimisation, marketing, photography and electronics. Please do subscribe to our channel to keep up to date, you can also follow PWP Web Design on Twitter and Facebook