Track Your Advertising Effectiveness

If you are running a marketing campaign to attract new and existing customers, chances are you’ve got leads and responses coming in from just about everywhere. So how can you tell which marketing tactics are great performers and which need to be replaced?

Through Sales Sort Codes

Sales Sort Codes are designed to be used on invoices to track advertising and how much revenue it generates for any given period of time. To begin, you must create your sales sort codes. Generally creating codes for yellow pages, newspaper, referral, etc. will do the job unless you have multiple yellow pages ads, newspaper ads, etc. in which case you will want to be more specific. To create sales sort codes in ESC, go to Sales → Enter Sales Sort Codes.

These codes can now be assigned to a customer’s record by one of three ways:

• When entering a new customer’s record in Customer Info.
• While dispatching a customer through the Dispatch.
• While billing a customer through Sales.

Customers should always be asked how they heard about you every time they call.

When a call comes in your dispatchers should ask the customer how they heard about your business. If the customer is new, the Sales Sort Code should be added to the customer’s record. The benefit of adding this code on the Customer Entry screen is the code will carry over to the dispatch, and once the dispatch is completed, that code will automatically carry over to the invoice. This provides you with the ability to run reports on all the different Sales Sort Codes.

If the call is from an existing customer changing the sales sort code on the Customer Entry screen is not required, since that’s your way of tracking how the customer originally heard about you. However, selecting the appropriate sales sort code on the Dispatch Entry screen is necessary in order to track how the customer heard about you this time.

Collecting this information will provide you with the number of hits you had from a particular advertising method (if more than one is being used concurrently) as well as the total revenue generated from the advertising. You can print the Sales Sort Code Analysis Report which provides statistical and financial information on the sort codes by going to Sales → Reports → Sales Reports → Sales Sort Code Analysis Report. Run this report before renewing any of your marketing to see if what you were doing was truly effective and profitable.

Written by Enrico Chatman
Featured in June 2009 Newsletter