When Numbers Don’t Add Up

So, you’ve invested time and money in what you felt was a solid marketing strategy but results aren’t showing. 
The phones are ringing, referrals keep coming in but sales aren’t converting. What do you do?

Two years ago I was working on an aggressive campaign for an engineering summer camp program for kids.  With a great deal of press, outreach events and a creative Facebook contest, we were getting a ton of inquiries but registrations weren’t happening.  It just didn’t add up. What was wrong?

After close investigation, we discovered that there were a high number of abandoned registrations on the website.  We printed out the list and called the parents who said they were having “issues” when registering.  People who still wanted to register their children were entered into the system manually until the problem was resolved.  The camps sold out.

We recovered approximately 70% of the registrations, and getting a personal call was good “PR,” but money was still lost.

Sometimes the simplest things can be the reason that “results aren’t showing.”  If you are experiencing a solid call volume but things aren’t “happening” something is wrong.

It could be as simple as a website glitch, or the person taking incoming calls is rude or worse – non responsive, or perhaps there is bad word of mouth for your product. (That’s a big one – you can have the best campaign in the world but if your customers aren’t happy with your product or service, well, that’s a whole other issue.)

Look at your data: Website hits and email open rates - anything you can think of as it pertains to your marketing.  Test the online purchasing system and make sure it’s easy to use.  There are a lot of other factors to consider, but check the basics first and then dig deep.