We were in the middle of our weekly meeting and it came time to present the KPI’s for our marketing. We were behind on our deal goals for the quarter and I was anxious to share good news about our marketing results.
I proudly showed the number of leads generated from the direct mail campaign to absentee owners with past due property taxes.
“Look at this. We sent out 2,347 letters and generated 19 leads. That’s nearly a 1% response rate. We should definitely scale up this campaign.”
We did.
Then, several months went by and the dust settled.
Nearly $10,000 spent and one deal to show for it all.
WTF
Basing Decisions On Incomplete Information Doesn’t Work
While the numbers used in this story are fictional (mainly because I don’t remember the exact numbers), the situation is familiar and common.
Even though we were doing well to measure how many leads we were getting per campaign, we weren’t looking at the whole enchilada.
There was so much more to the story.
I don’t know how many times I threw more money at campaigns that were generating calls but weren’t producing deals.
When you’re going off “gut” and justifying it with the fact you are busy and just need to crank up the calls, you’re really treating this business as a hobby.
This can put us out of business.
You Could Be Working Much Harder Than You Have To
Not only are we spending more to get less deals, more crap leads that don’t generate deals causes more work for you and your team.
Operating these campaigns takes time and energy. I cringe when I think of how many hours I spent signing letters and stuffing envelopes in the evening.
But wait, it gets worse…
If we are having to take more calls and go on more appointments to meet with unmotivated sellers, we’re wasting our precious time.
Who wants to do that?
How To Fix This – Start Measuring Everything
The first step is to start measuring everything per campaign.
Are you currently measuring all of marketing KPI’s (key performance indicators) for real estate investors:
- Cost
- Calls received
- Website submissions received
- Qualified leads (where the caller actually wants to get an offer – not ‘stop calling me’ or spam calls)
- Appointments scheduled
- Offers made (unique leads)
- Offers accepted
- Contracts
- Bought/Closed
The key here is to see what is happening with everything generating by EACH CAMPAIGN.
If you are only looking at the totals, you don’t really know how well each campaign is performing.
For example, you might notice that a certain direct mail campaign is getting you a bunch of calls, but the sellers just aren’t motivated enough to want an appointment. Time to put that money into a different campaign!
When you know how well each campaign is performing, you start being able to predict what will happen when you put more money into a specific campaign.
This is next level stuff folks!!!
How To Track Accurately
Are you using tracking phone numbers to track calls to campaigns? Do your website leads come into your CRM and automatically get attributed to the campaign that brought the motivated seller to your website?
You could ensure you and your team are always asking how they found out about you.
That can be hit or miss.
The optimal solution is to have attribution of a specific campaign to all calls and texts using a system like CallRail.
You could also set all of your website forms to send lead info to a CRM like Forefront CRM.
A setup like this will allow you to ensure all calls, texts, website leads all have their campaign set as soon as they come in!
Many Forefront CRM members also use our webhooks to send responses to texts sent by tools like LeadSherpa directly into their Forefront account.
This helps ensure not only do they know immediately when they get a new lead, but the leads also have their campaign automatically set.
This makes tracking marketing numbers accurate and effortless.
See Your Numbers Per Campaign In Real-Time
Ok, so you’re keeping track of which leads came in per campaign. Great work!!
Now what?
Now we need to track what happened to all of them…you know the KPI’s I mentioned earlier. Keeping track of that information can be brutal. That’s the fastest way to give me a headache.
That’s why we created the Funnel View within Forefront.
This view is one of my favorites. I love being able to see a graphical representation of the cost per each metric per campaign. So you can see the cost per lead during a time period for your Google Ads and then see the cost for each qualified lead then per appointment.
It’s eye opening to see what the cost for a campaign to get an appointment was!
Want To See This In Action?
Don’t get caught making decisions with incomplete information. Set your business up to track marketing accurately for all leads and what happens each step of the way to becoming a deal.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for all the power we’ve built into this platform. If you’d like to get a taste of what makes Forefront CRM the next big thing in the real estate investor software platform space, check out the demo.
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