In a firm I was involved with a few years ago, we tried very hard to analyze advertising expenditures. Was it effective? Should we do more Radio or Print or both? Should we increase the Ad budget? Reduce it? Spend more on direct mail? What is competition doing? It was a painful exercise.

We were almost paralyzed with indecision since we weren’t sure exactly what worked or not and were afraid to experiment with something so delicate. We kept asking ourselves the same question over and over – What influences a customer to come in and make a purchase?

Here’s an idea.

Instead of having a management meeting – how about asking the customer?

We started asking customers who came in the stores what influenced them to come in today…a stunning breakthrough in the annals of marketing and advertising!

The results were very interesting…less than 25% said anything about current advertising efforts. Not very encouraging…

The most interesting effect was on the closing rate - the rate of actual sales to potential sales. The closing rate went up dramatically. This turned out to be our most cost effective form of marketing- simply engaging the customer and acting interested in what they thought!

The cost? Almost negligible. The return on investment – incredible. The only additional ‘marketing’ cost was the additional commissions earned by salespeople. Depending on how we ran the numbers, the ROI ranged from 800 – 1400%.

For more on the subject of engaging customers and getting quality feedback check this article out on BNET .

As Jean Luc Picard would say, ‘Engage!’ and you may also ‘Make it so!’.

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