For several thousands of dollars that year we received 162 unique calls. It averaged $154.32 per call. However, our website averages over 400 unique visits per month and they are averaging 2.5 minutes on our site. That is way longer than someone is looking at our very expensive ad in the yellow pages.

I’m a firm believer in referral business, word of mouth, lettering your vehicles if it applies and getting involved in your local community. We still advertised in two smaller books this year which was much less money, however we are even considering not doing that next renewal. It’s free to have your listing in there or pay the minimum to put your name, address and website. Ask every customer how they heard of your business. We send feedback forms out to most customers and it asks right on there how they heard about us. You would be shocked to see how little comes from the phone books/yellow pages.

What is a new customer worth to your business? Do you know what it costs you to acquire a new customer? If you said no, how do you expect to measure the return on your advertising dollars? If you are serious about growing your business, you need to sta…

I’ve enjoyed exchanging thoughts with you via email lately. It seems that we think alike…always nice to meet other like-minded internet entrepreneurs. Good to see you online at the webinar today.

You got the facts right,

Tracking is great, improving is better.
Tracking visits and click-through rates
is tool to measure how a campaign is doing.

Throwing away the whole campaign because
of bad numbers is not the first thing I would do.
The YP ads usueally blow big time. Becuase of
theses 3 factors:
No USP
(why should they do business with you)
No Irresistible Offer
(get something for free that educates them on what to look out of ….
in exchage for their email or contact info)
No Clear Call To Action
(coupons are a good start but “Call before Sunday for the
YP callin special valid for 60 days)
No Clear Call To Action
(coupons are a good start but “Call before Sunday for the
YP call-in special valid for 60 days, or go to the websit for the Web special)
Mediocre copy

The YP reps hate it when you put a direct response ad in there because that means
you can track and will and that’s usually why advertizers pull their ads. The best we
go on YP ads was a 4.2:1 return. Some we can’t get anything out of for our clients
because of their industry. But imagine, if you get a 4:1 return, you may think this
is great, but truely, you can’t scale that.

Because spending twice as much won’t get you twiecethe business. So even if
they spend 5k/yr in YP ads, all they’re gonna get is $20k/yr in gross revenue.

The target for our client is 15:1 returns on the money they spend on online
and offline marketing.

So first he could have tried to change the profile to a direct response
w call to action ad.

Track that and then change the offer, change the call to action etc.
test test test test.

But I agree that even that would probably have not pulled enough
business to justify the maintenance cost in time and dollars.

Yves Baggi
http://www.15MinutesBusinessMarketing.com