As you reach out and work to cultivate prospects in your home business, or implement a marketing program to reach out to existing customers—your main goal is to get a response and bring individuals closer to your business. One of the areas that you can focus on if you want to make improvements is to strive to improve or increase the response rates—the rate of individuals who actually respond to your marketing and outreach efforts.
You can track your response rates if you keep records on who you are marketing too as well as who comes in for a purchase or more information and where they found out about your business. This might seem a little daunting but it is really a fairly simple ‘mathematical’ effort. For example, if you mail out 200 postcards, keep track of who responds and what they are responding to. If twenty people call or e-mail for more information and ten of those people actually make a purchase. You have good numbers that you can work with. Your response rate is 10% but the actual rate of individuals who spent money is only 5%. Now you can see how you can improve upon that in order to grow your business.
If you have a sale or do a direct sale party and there are 20 people that you make a pitch to, make a goal of how many individuals you hope to get responses from. It is probably unreasonable to assume that all 20 people will respond and make purchases. When you are first starting out, you might strive for 5-6 people and then work up to trying to get 10-12 individuals to convert to customers.
Setting solid financial goals is good, it can also help, however, to set response rate goals and work to make sure that you are improving your response rates with all of your marketing, sales and outreach efforts.