Mapping The Transaction Flow
In order to truly make your on-line campaigns a success, you should consciously break down the transaction flow, and for every step of the process figure out how to measure it, and then work on improving it. The simplest transaction flow is probably for SEM, so I’ll use it to illustrate my point. The transaction flow for SEM typically goes like this
Whatever your first on-line campaign, I strongly encourage you to physically draw out the transaction flow. Then, make sure you can measure each box on the chart.
I already hinted at this in Getting Your House In Order, but for most businesses, one of the biggest keys to the success of an on-line marketing campaign is what happens off-line. A big part of that is internal communication. You need to make sure that everyone in your organization understands that the campaign is happening, and how to properly interact with prospects from the campaign. The details of this will really depend on what you decided your goals were, but some things to think about include who is responding to emails, and with what message; how are phones being answered; what happens when someone walks into your business. If everyone in your company is on the same page, then your on-line campaign stands a much better chance of being a success.
When you’re drawing your transaction flow, be sure to remember to include any off-line portions of it as well. To go back to the example of “click on this link for a 10% discount code,” you would want to include an extra box at the bottom of the chart that says something like “customer comes into store with discount code”. Then you would want to find some way to track that; for example, integrating it into your POS system. Giving out a discount code isn’t very meaningful if it doesn’t actually result in more customers and increased sales. And while you might be able to tell just from customer counts or gross revenue, it sure would be nice to know for sure what your ROI from a given campaign is, wouldn’t it?
Conclusion
So, there you have it, a very high-level introduction to on-line marketing. It’s really not that hard:
- start with deciding on some goals,
- lay your foundation,
- run your campaign,
- and measure, measure, measure.
Hopefully you found this introduction useful, and, if you did, be sure to click on your favorite bookmark link below, and check back soon for the rest of the series.
Cheers,
Chris