Analyzing Outbound Campaigns - August 2023 Performance
👋 Hey, Jon here! We are starting to see demand slowing after a few great months of summer performance and now we are looking into the Fall with shoulder months approaching. One of the core trends I noticed this summer across many brands was a rise in unsold estimate revenue. Follow-up and activating customers in your pipeline will be critical as inbound leads continue to slow, so we’re going to deep-dive Chiirp's outbound campaign performance.
As a refresher, here’s July’s outbound campaign performance summary:
Response Rate: 15.9%
Total Revenue Opportunity: -23% month-over-month
Average Tickets: +2% month-over-month
Closed Revenue: -20% month-over-month
Closed Revenue Generated (3-location sample): $2.58 million
The sample size for the below data is over 5,600 outbound messages across 3 locations. Note that the outbound volume decreased by 65% (from 16,000 outbounds to 5,600).
Chiirp Outbound Campaigns Had a 16.9% Response Rate in August
Outbound campaign response rates went up slightly (+1%) from the month prior, which is expected with a much lower volume of outbound campaigns.
However, the highest response rate campaigns (and ultimately, the largest closed-revenue producer) were open estimate campaigns, which had an open rate of 48% and drove 34% of closed revenue despite having just 13% of the total audience.
If your unsold estimate / open estimate revenue is higher than your closed revenue at the end of the month (especially for paid ads), outbound campaigns are a must for your consideration because you’re likely leaving dollars on the table without them.
This is especially true during the summer when leads are plentiful and there’s always “the next opportunity”, but over the last few months I continued to see businesses with much more open revenue than closed.
Targeted outbound campaigns can drastically improve these numbers and in this case, helped to drive an additional $500,000 in installation revenue.
Total Revenue Opportunity from Outbound Campaigns Decreased By 30% But Was Above $2 Million
For the second straight month, we saw a decline in revenue opportunities from outbound campaigns.
However, when analyzing the performance of these campaigns, the audience size must be considered, and it was 65% smaller than the prior month.
This month, outbound campaigns generated a booking rate of 11% (630 new booked jobs out of the 5,600 people who were sent messages). In July, this was just 6%.
So despite a smaller revenue opportunity, the campaigns were more efficient with an almost doubling of booking rate, and the revenue opportunity per message sent was a whopping $364.58.
Total revenue opportunity is a useful metric to gauge top-level demand, but it’s also important to know the spread of unsold estimate revenue, sold revenue and closed revenue. With PPC, a lot of revenue opportunity was top-heavy in estimates (50%-60%), but for outbound campaigns, 80% of the revenue opportunity was sold or closed.
Average Tickets Increased 3% Month-Over-Month
Average tickets increased for the second straight month, this time by 3%, or another $100, nearing $4,000 per ticket.
There was $225,000 less revenue from open estimate campaigns from the prior month, so it’s great to see that average tickets still increased.
Closed Revenue From Outbound Campaigns Decreased 20% Month-Over-Month to $1.54 Million
Even though the audience was 65% smaller this month, closed revenue dropped only 20% and was still above $1.5 million across 3 locations.
That works out to $273 of closed revenue per customer who received an outbound message (not all of these customers booked - I am using this data point as an efficiency metric, as finding a good balance of audience size for outbound campaigns is important).
There were also 90 installation jobs booked from unsold estimate campaigns that drove over a third of the closed revenue for this month.
As I noted in the last newsletter, sold revenue from PPC was down 30% month-over-month and many businesses are preparing for the slow down barring any significant weather changes. And while many companies reflect this anticipated slow down in their sales projections, don’t overlook the revenue-generating capability of outbound campaigns.
The key, as always, is to have targeted messaging to the right audience with defined outcomes that impact your business in the way you want.
Until next time . . .
-Jon