How do you know whether to double down on a marketing channel versus abandoning it entirely?

Simple: you track how much you spend on each marketing channel versus how much revenue it generates. 

Some channels will deliver ten times as much revenue as they cost. Others won’t generate a cent, but will cost you dearly. And you’ll never know the difference without tracking the numbers.

Tracking Each Marketing Campaign Performance

As a real estate wholesaler or flipper, it takes effort and money to generate leads. 

Common marketing campaigns for real estate investors include direct mail, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), organic search engine optimization (SEO), and perhaps ringless voicemail or SMS campaigns. But within those broad categories lie more specific marketing channels.

For example, you might send direct mail to leads you found through probate, or driving for dollars, or pre-foreclosure. You might set up PPC campaigns on Google, or Bing, or Facebook.

That means you need to get granular when you track marketing campaigns. And you can do that with a real estate CRM platform to track many campaigns simultaneously. 

Drilling Down Within Campaigns

It sounds simple and intuitive. But how do you actually track the revenue generated from each of your marketing channels?

Direct Mail

On REsimpli, you can set up different direct mail campaigns for each source of leads. So you set up one campaign for driving for dollars leads, another for pre-foreclosure leads, and so on.

When you upload a spreadsheet of mail recipients, you select the campaign that sourced the leads. You can write a distinct letter template for each campaign, tailored to each type of seller. 

Just as importantly, you can provide a different phone number for each campaign type. When leads call you, the CRM automatically tags them based on the tracking phone number.

You’ll know exactly how many calls came in from pre-foreclosure leads versus probate leads in any given month, without having to manually label them.  

Organic Website Traffic

Many real estate investors also use local SEO to attract traffic and leads. Even if you do your own SEO, it still costs time and labor. Put a dollar value on it regardless of whether you do the work yourself or pay someone else.

You can automatically tag leads who contact you through your public website as SEO. 

Don’t stop there though. Tweak your landing pages to find the most effective copy, images, and layouts, using A/B testing. 

PPC Campaigns

Likewise, you can send leads from different PPC sources to different landing pages on your website. You could have one page for leads from Google ads, another for Youtube ads, and another for Facebook ads.

These pages could look identical, or you could tailor them for different audiences. Also, note that these pages shouldn’t be connected to your public website. No organic SEO visitors should be able to find these pages by browsing your site. The only way to find these pages should be by clicking an ad. 

When leads fill out the contact form, the system can tag them as coming from a specific ad campaign. Easy peasy. 

Isolate Variables

As you set up these campaigns, aim to test one variable at a time. 

For example, when you’re testing different PPC platforms, send visitors to identical pages. If the pages are wildly different, you won’t know whether it was the ad platform or the page layout that made the difference. 

Use the scientific method to test one variable at a time, so you don’t confuse causes for each effect. 

Focus on Net Profit, Not Gross Revenue

Imagine two marketing campaigns. One generates five leads earning $200,000 in annual revenue for you, but costs you $170,000. 

The other generates two leads earning $80,000, but only costs you $20,000. Which is the better campaign? 

Real estate deals require labor. As you measure and compare marketing campaigns, keep the bigger picture in mind: net profit matters more than raw revenue. 

The better data you have on your marketing channels, the better decisions you can make about where to invest more versus where to pull back.