With more people using a variety of devices to browse the internet and make purchases, it’s more important than ever for marketers to track what we’re doing online.
By analyzing online data, marketers are able to gain valuable insight, which in turn helps brands to drive greater engagement and reveals how they can provide better functionality of their digital assets and tailor their marketing activity.
Yet as we grow more concerned with user-centric metrics, so many marketers are forgetting one incredibly important communication asset within the buying cycle: the humble telephone. You know, that chunky piece of equipment connected to a landline.
Although I make it sound like your telephone is sat on your desk gathering dust, the truth is, you use it every single day to connect with your customers, and them with you.
Why the telephone isn’t archaic
Many brands rely on the telephone more than they might realise.
For example, a lot of prospects favor picking up the phone to talk to businesses about their products and services as opposed to filling out an online contact form.
Why? Because prospects can receive a quicker response over the phone than they can from filling out an online enquiry form.
Also, a lot of businesses seem to forget that whichever marketing channels they’re using for campaigns, be it AdWords advertizing, (quality directories) and even their own websites, their marketing will be generating phone calls.
And let’s not forget that some businesses still use offline advertising like print, TV ads and billboard advertising. All of which will be generating phone enquiries.
But guess what? Technology has evolved to allow marketers to track the effectiveness of their offline marketing and telephone enquiries.
Call tracking and web analytics software is helping businesses attribute phone calls back to the original piece of marketing a prospect engaged with. Alongside this, the web analytics component of call tracking software seamlessly links the online customer journey with offline phone calls, which helps brands to make sense of their audience’s path to conversion.
If you’re already using call tracking, this seems like very basic stuff. But, there are a number of other features of call tracking that I guarantee aren’t being used to their full advantage. And it’s these tools that are helping businesses to make significant operational improvements and better informed decisions about their marketing spend.
Here are four invaluable features of call tracking.
1. Call alerts
it pays to be prepared…literally. Phone calls are amongst your most valuable leads, and you don’t want to miss them. Call alerts mean that you’ll never miss a priority call ever again. Through your software, you can configure call alert monitors that signal when an important client or prospect calls, giving you time to polish and prepare the best sales message, ultimately developing the lead into a satisfied client.
Call alerts can work in conjunction with specific marketing campaigns. For instance, if you’ve sent out an offline mailer to 50 priority contacts, you can assign a unique phone number to that particular mail out. When you receive a call from that unique number, your call alert springs into action and you’ll immediately be notified that a prospect from your priority list is waiting for you on the line.
2. Call recording
If you’re looking to continually improve your business’s quality of service and quality of leads, then call recording is the tool you’re looking for.
SMEs and large corporations alike can benefit from call recording. Managers will be able to evaluate as many outbound and inbound calls as they wish, and easily identify any areas for concern or improvement. Common mistakes can be quickly rectified and advice regarding sales language can be built upon through experience, self-evaluation and training.
This ability to evaluate the performance of direct response has been essential for Ptarmigan Media’s financial services clients. They’ve been working with call tracking software specialist, Mediahawk, for over five years, and found that this type of data has improved the efficiency of their client’s call centres.
There are more examples of how the features of call tracking can enhance the operational side of your businesses in The Financial Marketer’s Guide to Call Tracking, free to download from Mediahawk’s website.
3. Offline & online ROI evaluation
Large portions of your market budgeting can be poured into covering different marketing media, but it’s imperative that you are able to measure where you are getting the best ROI.
Your sales leads are generated both online and offline, so naturally you will need to measure your investment from both environments to build an accurate and full picture of your ROI. Having all the information to hand will help you to hone marketing campaigns and give a truer representation of which marketing is and isn’t working.
For instance, if your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns are generating more leads than a print advertising campaign, then you might be tempted to slash your budget on print media altogether. BUT without unique phone numbers and call tracking applied across marketing campaigns, there’s no way to truly quantify your actual offline and online ROI. Simply cutting one advertising medium based on lead numbers alone is risky. After all, it’s about quality leads and conversions.
The majority of call tracking software can be easily integrated into web analytics programmes, including Google Analytics, and Google AdWords. This integration will effectively close the loop on your prospects conversion path, helping marketers drill down through the data to see where prospect originally began their journey.
4. Advanced call reporting
Making sense of the (often) complex purchasing cycle is a difficult task, but call tracking’s reporting suite can make it a much easier, less demanding and much quicker process.
Unlike online analytics, the data collected from call tracking software allows marketers to analyse each marketing channel in depth. The reason for this is because call tracking’s analytics features don’t simply track phone call interactions. The integrated web analytics tracking can trace every individual interaction a prospect has had with your website.
Let’s put this into perspective. Prospect A may have received a piece of direct mail with a promising insurance quote or deal. They then called their current insurance provider, only to find out that the deal isn’t as good as they’d hoped. Looking for a better deal, Prospect A then shops around online, and checks out a few comparison websites. Whilst browsing online, they come across your company’s AdWords ad, and decide to give you a call from a number supplied on a specific landing page. This drill-down of data is vital in assessing prospects’ behaviour and deciding where advertising is best placed to generate the leads most likely to convert.
But the data isn’t just limited to lead and conversion attribution. The information collected can reveal insights about demographics – for instance, which advertising campaigns perform best in which areas of the country – or more detailed information, such as whether newspaper print adverts are more popular in city-based publications than their suburban counterparts. It’s all about turning data into clear signposts that point to the best marketing solutions.
So, as we can see, there is far more to call tracking than we might first realize. Although lead generation and sales attribution is key to your business’ bottom line, features like call recording and call alerts can have an enormously beneficial impact upon the efficiency of your sales team and how you run your business.
