What is Sales Tracking?
Customer Sales Tracking, or lead tracking is knowing where your customers, leads and sales came from. This helps you determine where to spend your marketing dollars. As a general rule, you should track everything, sales, customers, leads, everything.
Business Cards for Lead Tracking
Business cards should have some sort of special offer on them, good only to those that present the card. This does two things: makes your customer keep your card longer, gives you a chance to see if there are any special tracking markings on the card. For example, you could stamp the cards you leave in a certain store with a tracking number. Later when you get the card back, you can easily tell where that customer came from. Sales tracking like this helps you determine if you should offer to pay that store to keep your cards in place, or if a sign would be a good investment there.
Brochures for Tracking Customers
American express uses brochures for tracking by adding a number or identifier on them, like the business card example above. You could easily do the same thing. Different brochures could have different advertisements on them as well, so you know which ad gets the best response. Something should make them want to keep the brochure, like a discount, or a freebie if they present the brochure.
Classified Ads For Tracking
You can track customers and leads through classified ads several ways:
- Ask for "marketing code" as a name. Different names could be different ads, different locations, etc.
- Dial Extension "marketing code. Different codes can be used for tracking. When they call, just ask what extension they need.
- Promo codes, special offers using promo codes. You can track by what promo code they report.
- Different phone numbers can be used for tracking. Depending on what number they call ... etc.
Search Engine Results
If you are testing different online ads, banners, etc, you can track them very easily using the ability of most servers to log everything and accept extra commands. Here is what a link with a command looks like:
This will log the extra data after the question mark in your logs and then you can just review your logs to see how many times that command came.
You can also add more data like this:
You can ad infinite data groups using the format SOMELINK?1=a&2=b&3=etc This is how internet programs get their peices of data, but if you don't have a program it is just ignored ( and logged ).
What you would do is post different links in different search engines or locations, or for each classified ad you have online. This makes it easy to track them all.
Phone Numbers For Tracking Customers
See above, but different numbers, extensions, or who you ask for can all be used to sort tracking information and determine where the ad came from, which ad it was, etc.
Sales Tracking With Coupons
Stores regularly use coupons with promo codes to see which paper is being read.
Commissions for Tracking Sales
For example, if I leave 10 stacks of business cards at different locations, giving $100 commission on a $500 website sale, I will soon know which stores are pushing my product. They will contact me and let me know who they gave cards to, and if they don't, you can still ask the customer where they received your information.
Usually a business card would have a tracking number on it so this process is invisible to the customer.
Sales Tracking Scripts ( Email )
Most bulk emailing software scripts have a way to send form letters. You can use the customers email in a picture location like this:
<img src="http://yourwebsite.com/images/pixel.gif?them@theiremail.com" alt="">
This would pull the picture called "pixel.gif" from yourwebsite.com, but in the logs, it will leave a fingerprint of "them@theiremail.com". Everything after a question mark in a link is considered a command. In most cases this command info is ignored if it isn't used, but it is still logged.
It is not too difficult to write a script to collect information like this and display a 1x1 pixel image that is hidden in the email.
Just the fact that the picture gets loaded tells you that they opened the email, even if they don't click any links.
You could progress this further by also adding a clickable link in the email:
http://yourwebsite.com/tracking.cgi?them@theiremail.com
Obviously you would want to name the programs a little bit differently so the customer doesn't feel like cattle being herded!
The program could count that customer, promo code or whatever, and then redirect them to the home page of the website. All of this tracking process could very easily be invisible to the customer ( and it should be ).
Watching How Companies Track You
Try to pay attention to how your information is being cycled through different contacts with businesses. If you pay attention, you'll see how you are being tracked! Another company could have a great sales tracking idea that you can implement for yourself.