Phone books are falling out of favor with people looking for local businesses. It used to be that your name in the yellow pages was the first line of advertising. No longer. Curious customers have begun moving away from the turn of the yellow page and toward the click of the mouse. As a matter of fact, three of the top five ways in which a Comscore study determined that people find local businesses involved the Internet rather than print media. Here they are:

• 31% visit a search engine, searching without a specific brand or business in mind
• 30% look up a business in print in the phone book
• 19% use Internet directories
• 11% look at local search sites like Google Maps (driving directions)
• 3% get their information from a newspaper or magazine

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This is a guest post from John Clements, a Direct Response / Lead Generation Marketing consultant.
www.ClementsMktgGroup.com

Now that you’ve set up your tracking system, let’s look at why and what you should track.
Testing is the “’life blood” of direct response marketing. Testing is critical for all DR Lead Generation customer acquisition channels. If you don’t test, how do you know which are your best offer(s)? Your best list? Or your best creative package?

If you continuously use the same images, the same offers in the same vehicles – consumers will eventually see you in the same light as the furniture store that’s been going out of business for the past 7 years. There will be no urgency to “act now” in your message. “Sally, we don’t have to call for

now, they’re always on sale. Let’s wait for….” As the same images, offers and vehicles lose their response percentage, we call that package fatigue. It’s just tired. Testing can give you a fresh, new lead generator.Testing determines which of the “Triangle Elements” (to be discussed in future articles) works best together, either overall or in a particular marketing channel. With proper testing techniques, you can increase leads and your customers which will give you more business! How does more leads for the same cost sound? Good? That’s exactly what you’ll get with a valid testing strategy. Your lead or acquisition cost decreases. Additionally, by finding out what element(s) doesn’t work as well, you can save money by eliminating that element for one that does work. Then you can reallocate or replace those same funds you just saved into “working” pieces which, again, will increase your business. (more…)