Creating engagement and awareness is no longer the most important metric for measuring your marketing campaign’s success. Lead generation should be integrated into every step of your customer journey – making sure that your marketing is not only capturing your audience’s attention but their data as well.

When measuring your campaign’s success, it is sometimes hard to illustrate the value of the campaign when all metrics revolve around Brand awareness, positive perceptions and goodwill.  And while these achievements are all important in a world where one tweet has the power to undo years of marketing and good reputation, capturing quality data has the ability to put a tangible value to your existing marketing campaigns.

1. Calculate the value of each lead captured

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the amount of value that a customer will spend with your company over their lifetime. And while CLV can be calculated historically, it can also be used to predict not only what a customer is worth to you now, but also how their value will change over time, giving you an estimation of how much this customer acquisition is worth to you over their lifetime. This will give you an indication of how much value can be added to your business simply by capturing customer data and should influence the budget to be allocated to ongoing data capture and communications across all digital platforms.

2. Capture data across all customer touch points

For many sites that do not offer ecommerce sales opportunities it might seem like capturing customer data would not have much value as there is no easy purchase journey. However for this reason it is all the more important to build a large database and communicate to them frequently. The bigger your database, the bigger the estimated response if one estimates a response rate of 1% (using 1% as a prudent example). By capturing consistent data fields on all customer touch points you are ensuring that you are building the biggest database you possibly can, growing the customer audience you can promote your services and products to.

3. Communicate frequently with audience

Not all data captured can be seen as active leads, however this does not mean that these leads (old or otherwise) are of no value to your business. Through frequent email communications to your database you are able to showcase your service offering/ promotion and convert an old subscriber into a new sale. Only through frequent email communication of relevant information and offers will you be able to ensure that you re-engage with these customers – increasing your sales and also saving you money on new lead acquisitions.

4. Transform data into leads and sales

But why are we hammering on about CLV? By capturing data on all customer touch points across the entire customer journey, you are building a big database of people who are interested in your product or service. While not all of the users in your database are currently active sales leads, they can be transformed into leads and sales through consisted communication and marketing. Clothing and apparel ecommerce sites have perfected this strategy. They send daily email communication to their existing database (or leads) to entice and convert each user into a sale. The following calculation would better illustrate this fact – should 1% of an existing database of 100 000 make one purchase per newsletter broadcast of R200, it would generate R200 000 of sales for the company (1000*R200). Multiply this with at least 2 email broadcasts per month and you could be looking at a total sales generated of R400 000 per month from your existing database, not including the sales generated through ongoing promotions, in-store activations or telesales.

Contact Digital Fire for assistance on how to build a fully integrated leads database and marketing communications plan through email marketing.