Lead sources are designed so that you can see where your sales and contacts are coming from. Examples may be:
- Word of mouth
- Search engine
- Existing customer
- Email marketing
- Press articles
You can choose Lead Sources manually within Brightpearl admin, or if contacts are created from a website or smartform, Brightpearl can do it automatically for you.
Once a contact has a lead source, all sales for that contact will inherit the same lead source. When those sales are invoiced, the accounting journals will use the lead source on the sale.
Setting up lead sources
Marketing lead sources can be set up from the Contacts zone from the menu Marketing : Lead Sources. Each lead source is given a numerical ID, which will be used for marketing campaigns online. Active lead sources will be shown in menus throughout Brightpearl so that you can assign contacts, orders, sales and costs to the lead source.
Public lead sources
When your customers place an order through the checkout, Brightpearl will tag the order with the lead source.
If Brightpearl was unable to automatically determine the lead source it will present a drop down list for the customer to select a lead source. If a lead source is set to public it will be available for the customer to select at this point.
As Brightpearl is very good at automatically tagging lead sources on customers you do not need to set all lead sources as public, the sources that should be public are ones where you did not explicitly provide a link to your website. Examples of public lead sources would be "Word of Mouth", "Radio Advert" or "Newspaper Story".
Tracking inbound website links (manual)
You can request that other websites link to your website using the campaign tracking ID (eg ?cid=xx).
The "cid" link should be added to every link on their website. If the link URL already has a question mark in it, then add &cid=xx to the end.
Examples of inbound links:
http://www.yourdomain.com/page-here.html?cid=23
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?p=contact&cid=23
Note how the second link will link to your contact page (the p=contact bit), but will also tag the visitor with a cookie relating to campaign ID 23.
Tracking inbound links (automatically)
You can set up "lead source domains" to catch incoming links that do not have a tracking ID.
From the Contacts zone select "Marketing" : "Lead source domains" from the menu. From here you will be able to assign domain names to lead sources. Once set up, any visitor that arrives at your website having followed a link from a domain in the "Lead source domains" list will be automatically tagged with the corresponding lead source.
A typical example is to create a lead source called "Google natural listings", and then assign "google.co.uk", "google.com", "google.fr" etc to that lead source from the lead source domains section. Note that the "www" is missing, since many inbound links may not contain these and Brightpearl does not need them to determine where visitors are coming from.
You can just use part of the domain name, so for example "google" as the domin will match "google.com", "google.co.uk" etc.
Suggestions for tracking leads off your website:
- Yahoo
- Bing
Allocating costs and revenues
Each accounting transaction (eg bank payments, purchase invoices) can be allocated to a lead source. In a similar fashion, any sales or purchase orders can be assigned to a lead source using the drop-down menu in the "other/payment info" tab. This allows you to accurately track your spend on each lead source and the resulting business that it generates.
The Profit and Loss report can be filtered by Lead source.
Brightpearl SmartForms - Contact pages
Your website is set up as default with two “SmartForm” pages into which visitors enter information:
- Main contact page
- Registration page
These are customisable so that you can define the information captured from your website users. You can add further contact pages specific to your requirements or marketing campaigns. SmartForms can also be embedded in third party websites allowing you to capture contacts directly in to your Brightpearl from nearly any website.
From the Contact zone select "Setup" > "SmartForms" from the menu to take you to the SmartForms edit screen. If you have the Brightpearl website module you can also access this page from the Website zone under "SmartForms".
Each SmartForm can be configured to send an automated email response and/or create a contact in your database as well as sending the results of the form to a specified email address.
Bear in mind that if you choose to create a contact in your database from a “contact” page rather than a registration page, the user will not know that their details are being stored and may be surprised when they later come to register on your site and find that their email address is already on your records.
Before attempting to create a new contact in your database, Brightpearl will check to see if there is already a contact with the same email address. If the contact already exists, a note will be added to the contact’s notes trail.
For each contact page you should enter some information to show the user before and after the form is displayed.
For more information about creating SmartForms and ideas on how to use them please refer to the Brightpearl SmartForms documentation.
Custom fields
You can set up any number of custom fields for customers and/or suppliers to allow you to store or capture information beyond what Brightpearl provides as default. These custom fields can be added to your registration and contact pages, as well as showing in a customers account (viewable by themselves online) for editing if required.
From the Contacts zone select "Setup" > "Custom fields" from the menu.
Custom fields should be set to be visible for suppliers and/or customers, in this way you can set different fields for the two types of contact.
For more information on setting up and using custom fields please refer to the Contact Custom Fields documentation.
Lists of contacts (trade shows/purchased lists)
Brightpearl will allow you to import lists of contacts created in Excel, and assign a campaign to these contacts. If any of the contacts then go on to make purchases or create sales you will be able to track them against the campaign.
- Click Contacts - Setup - Import/Export from the main menu
- Format your spreadsheet of contacts as shown
- Save it as a “Text (Tab de-limited)” file
- Select a campaign ID and a group
- Import the contacts
Selecting a group specifically for this list of contacts will allow you to find them more easily later. Contacts can be added or removed from multiple groups at any time.
Google Adwords, Overture, Yahoo and other online lead generators
If you choose to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign then Brightpearl can be set up to track sales made as a result of these clicks. Each of the PPC providers will provide tracking and conversion results, but using Brightpearl in addition to this requires no extra work and will allow you to measure sales versus expenses and give a true return on investment figure (if you’re using Brightpearl accounting).
Each lead source is assigned a numerical ID, which should be added to any link that directs a potential customer to your website, for example to tag a visitor as referred by lead source 3, use
http://www.yourwebsite.com/?cid=3
Any visitor arriving at your website by clicking this URL will have a cookie placed on their computer that will last for 30 days. If at any point in the next 30 days they register or place an order, their contact information and the order will be tagged as being referred by that lead source. Once a contact has been tagged with a lead source it cannot be changed.
Just set up a lead source as outlined above and make sure that all inbound links have the lead source id (?cid=XX) appended to the end of the URL.
Note: You can change the length of time that the tracking cookie is valid for from 30 days to any value you want from the Setup zone. Select "Other" > "Affiliates" from the menu
Google Product Feeds (Google Base)
Google has a free product search that only requires you to register and regularly upload a spreadsheet of items to generate extra visitors to your website. You should also create a lead source to monitor the sales made as a result of Google Base generated visitors, and then link the Google Base feed to this lead source from the Setup zone under "Other" > "Website".
Full information on setting up a Brightpearl product feed and getting Google to automatically download and process it for you can be found on the GoogleBase documentation page.
Discount codes
Discount codes can be used in conjunction with any other marketing channel to allow you to track the effectiveness of your advertising. Offering a discount or free shipping will give the customer an incentive to enter a code which will allow you to see exactly the source of the sale.
If, for example you take out an advert in a magazine you can offer a discount to readers of the magazine that is not offered elsewhere. The customer would enter a discount code into the website checkout when they buy online, or mention it over the phone, and the sale would be reduced in price accordingly.
You can assign a code to a campaign, or leave it unattached to a campaign. Note that if you do assign a campaign to a promotional code, when the code is used, the campaign set will overwrite any other existing campaign information for that particular sale.
If a customer has not already got campaign information attached to them, the campaign used for the code will be attached to the customer, meaning that any further sales within 30 days will also be marked against the same campaign.
Discount codes can be set from the Contacts zone by selecting "Marketing" > "Discount Codes" from the menu. Information on how to set up codes can be found on the Discount Codes documentation page.
Search engine optimisation
Brightpearl allows you to create a website designed for optimal search engine rankings. Using a number of best practises we have been able to build a website platform that is easy for real people and search engines to navigate. Meta descriptions and keywords can be set on a site-wide, page or product level and the page URLs produced throughout Brightpearl are both consistent and relevent (what is known as "pretty" URLs or "SEO friendly").
Further information on Brightpearl SEO can be found at the Brightpearl search engine optimisation page.
