Found Money:   Five Places You Can Find Revenue in Your Direct Response Campaign

It’s there, guaranteed. Revenue that is. Revenue that’s generated by your direct response or direct to consumer campaign but not yet claimed. To make it yours, it’s a bit like digging for gold or gemstones – you have to know where to look and how to extract it.

Underpriced Offers:
It’s quite possible you have underpriced your product or service without even knowing it. Do you know, with certainty, the price to value ratio threshold for your customer? Do you really need to offer free shipping? How urgent of a problem does your product solve? In direct response, price testing is essential.

Phone Center Scripting:
Whether external or internal, finding revenue in a call center is easy. And it usually lies in your inbound or outbound script. Have you reviewed your script since the program launched? Have you done enough inbound test calls at different hours and days to understand where operators may be having trouble? How many recorded calls have you listened to? Perhaps rewriting a preformatted script template to be more consumer friendly is in order.

Upsells and Add-Ons:
Consumers in an active transactional mindset many times are willing to spend more with you…if it makes sense. Review your direct response upsells and cross check for disconnects in affinity. If I have just purchased a vacuum cleaner, I could be interested in an add-on tool package. But not magazines or cruises.

Online Resellers:
Proper policing is essential to reign in affiliates, resellers and wholesalers that may be part of your business model. It’s frighteningly easy for your online to get out of control, with many different parties offering different prices, offers and dreaded discount language, thus eroding your price point integrity dramatically, while cannibalizing your direct response sales.

Web Sites/Landing Pages:
You cannot set it and forget it in direct response or direct to consumer marketing. But web is hard and takes time. Guess what, there is revenue in them hills. Web needs to be a daily exercise in optimization, testing and CRM troubleshooting. Do so and you will be amazed at the impact a ½ percent increase in conversions will have on your program. 

tandemROI is a cross-channel advertising and marketing agency located in Tampa, FL.

It's All in the Numbers, If You Know Where to Look

Whether we're in a new business pitch, or at a tradeshow, or at a networking event, we're often asked how success is measured in our business. In the direct response arena, it's fairly simple - direct sales and revenues. And do those sales/revenues exceed the marketing investment to acquire that customer. 

Success lies in the data, pure and simple. So to understand a campaign's efficiency, and to make solid ROI optimization moves, there are many metrics we measure and analyze. Below we've listed the top six direct response metrics, when measured properly, can provide clear answers and direction for just about any campaign. 

CPR – cost per response

Media spend / total responses (phone + web)

Here we factor in all responses and divide into the spend. This provides a good benchmark of how responsive the program is and can be an indicator of how strong the creative is pulling.

CPC – cost per call

Media spend / total calls

While phone volume is declining currently, measuring cost per call is still a very reliable metric for efficiency, as toll free calls are tracked in a 1:1 ratio to each network via unique toll free number.

CPV – cost per visit

Media spend / unique web visitors

It is not uncommon to have at least 80% of upfront response go to the web when phone and URL are displayed. CPV gives a clear indication of web response and efficiency. In pure drive to web programs, CPV will be the key front end response metric.

CPL – cost per lead

Media spend / total leads

For lead generation programs, or two-step sales models, CPL will be the key metric in evaluating efficiency. CPL is dictated heavily by the conversion path process (phone or web) and not the creative or media.

CPO – cost per order

Media spend / total orders

In the end, CPO is the ultimate metric in any direct response campaign. However, CPO is a product of the sales conversion process, not creative or media, so care should be given in how this metric is evaluated. 

AOV - average order value

Revenues / total orders

AOV is an important direct response metric in that it can be directly compared to CPO to determine whether revenue exceeds the cost to acquire. AOV can and should be heavily influenced by a solid upsell strategy. 

Depending on a direct response campaign's compexity, many more metrics may come into play. For example, on a drill down basis, some companies will use a CPLS metric. CPLS is cost per lead sold. Thus in a two step model, leads are measured on the front end, then corresponding sales conversion data is supplied later as the sales cycle completes. This data then paints a clear of how many of those leads actually convert to a sale, a key metric for any sales department within an organization.