I am often surprised at the lack of marketing ROI metrics collected by most companies. In fact, when I have discussed online marketing plans with potential clients one of their major concerns is that they have no idea of the effectiveness of the dollars they have been spending. While most marketers do realize that analytics packages are available and should be used, there are many pieces of data that no analytics package can capture. These items are the actions that occur offline.

This data is even more crucial to track with service companies, such as financial services, appliance repair, restaurants, doctors, and lawyers to name a few. Generally speaking, most prospects will visit a website to gather information, then when they are ready to take the next step, pick up the phone and call. As the online marketer it is imperative to have the data showing how well the website is converting visitors to prospects, particularly when the call to action most users prefer to take is to make a phone call and get specific questions answered. Are you capturing this?

Many companies already understand the need, but the execution is where the real problem lies. With one client I observed the CSRs making the inquiry of the prospect, however a meaningful answer was not being derived. For example:

The CSR asked the question: “What search engine do you use?”

The question should have been: “Do you remember how you found our website?”

The problem with the first question was that most people would respond with “Google,” whether or not they actually even used a search engine to locate your website. Consequently the company believed they were doing very well with Google, while the analytics and testing was not showing the same information. We changed the script and now they have more meaningful data. Marketing learned that some of their offline efforts (like billboards and postcards) were doing even better then they expected.

Your customer service reps are a key component to understanding how well your marketing efforts are working. It can be a wise decision to add a member of your customer service team to the marketing team and have them take ownership of collecting this data.

Marketing online is part of a holistic approach and every piece of collectable data needs to be recovered during the sales cycle and mined by marketing. The results could turn your next mediocre quarter into your next record quarter.