Is your OFFLINE marketing strategy COST EFFECTIVE?

Question

Is your offline marketing strategy cost effective? Here is a brief analysis comparing cost per lead of Direct Mail vs. Outbound cold calling in Phoenix Arizona. Nothing proprietary here.

Jared Vidales · Answer

1) The argument can be made that if the same marketing list was targeted by both direct mail & cold calling techniques, you would get in front of more people, or "opportunities" with cold callers with the same cost. This is a variable you can control, you cannot control motivation.

2) My time is worth more than $17/hr, which is why its outsourced and managed with the option to scale.

3) We've invested a lot of money into branding. We call from a generic brand in the case of pissed off sellers, which we get ALOT of. All data is scrubbed against the national DNC list.

@Ryan Dossey

Ryan Dossey · Answer

While I do find it relevant to track metrics I have a few thoughts.

1) Cost per lead is a pretty useless metric to track.

I'm more interested in cost per deal and profit per deal.

2) This ties into #1 but motivation per deal. I'd rather meet with 1 motivated seller than 5 who aren't.

3) What is your time worth? I see 6,269 minutes under "dialing time". At $17 an hr you're at $1,776.22. For the sake of conversation, that puts you at roughly 1500 pieces of mail. If you'd be cold calling yourself... That's roughly 105 hours.

4) What has been your view on damage to brand credibility? While folks don't love getting solicitations in the mail, they hate sales calls even more. The DNC registry size currently sits at 222 Million. With the US population size at around 318 Million.

Not knocking anything at all. We had a full-time cold caller on staff and noticed the above issues in our experience over several months in multiple markets.