Response Capture

A friend called me today to share results from a recent webinar program.  I was excited to hear how the program performed because I had shared some of my learning’s from a landing page optimization course when she was in the webinar planning stage.

The first thing she said was, “please no laughter,” and of course I could not help but laugh.  I felt like a kid being told not to do something and purposing doing it anyway.

We both stopped laughing and got down to evaluating the marketing performance results. She explained that:

• 10,000 email invitations were sent out for the campaign
• 40 people registered to attend the live webinar
• 20 people actually attended the webinar

A number of questions came to mind but the first thing was, “How does the results of this webinar compare to other webinars the company had executed in the past?”  At this point, I wasn’t prepared to declare success or failure as webinar attendance was just the first measure of success.  Her job was not in jeopardy due to 20 people attending the webinar; there was bigger fish to fry.

I asked, “Of those that attended, how many resulted in a sale?”

That is when the conversation gets interesting because at the end of the day, sales numbers are always what really matters to an organization.

If your children come to you and say they want to be popular at school, you wouldn’t tell them to focus on having the most friends on Facebook.  You know that having real relationships with people is what really matters.

In the same way, creating marketing programs that generate a lot of online activity but don’t result in sales are difficult to label as great marketing programs.

For my friend, generating 20 attendees out of 10,000 emails could be good or could be bad.  If one of those 20 attendees is worth a one million dollar sale, she could certainly declare SUCCESS!

Marketers who play the numbers game and connect marketing results to actual sales, always know what value they bring to the organization.  To play the numbers game, my friend is working with her sales organization to understand the value that is being realized from the 20 webinar attendees before she declares the program a success.