Many marketing campaigns launch with vague goals like “increase brand awareness” or “encourage customer engagement.”
These efforts might mean well, but their impact on your business is foggy at best. Wouldn’t it be better to put a marketing plan in place using measurable data, so you can see how your investment is impacting your ROI?
Online marketing and analytics make it possible to measure data and optimize your campaigns. One form of leads is often overlooked, however — phone calls. If your marketing team is tracking your website and pay-per-click landing page performance, it’s crucial to start a similar tracking program for phone calls.
Prospective customers are usually deep into the conversion process when they call your business. The information they provide — where they found out about you, what their needs are, etc. — will be invaluable for your marketing team. But how will you collect this information?
The answer is simple — call tracking.
What is Call Tracking?
Call tracking programs allow you to create a unique phone number for your marketing campaign (or assign different numbers to specific campaigns). Each of these numbers forwards to your main business phone number, so your staff can answer the call as if it came directly to your office.
As CallRail explains, call tracking allows you to compare the phone traffic generated by each line and determine which marketing strategies are working. You can also gather detailed information to improve your marketing strategies’ effectiveness — and increase your return on investment.
CallRail and other call tracking agencies also offer dynamic number insertion. This replaces the phone numbers on your website based on the pathway a visitor took to reach your site. Dynamic number insertion lets you track phone leads from each source of your online marketing campaign separately. You’ll be able to tell when a visitor comes to your site from Yelp or a PPC landing page, for example.
We’ve highlighted a few of the benefits of call tracking below. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but hopefully it will give you an idea of how adding this simple component to your marketing campaign can help your business in the long run.
5 Benefits of Call Tracking
1) Evaluate Your Marketing Campaign
Data from call tracking makes it much easier to monitor and quantify the success of your marketing campaign.
Unique, trackable phone numbers offer a clearer picture of which ads are producing the most profit. Measurable metrics from call tracking include:
- Volume of calls
- When and where the calls come from
- Length of calls
- PPC landing page performance
- Conversion rate
The information available from call tracking can also help you measure the effectiveness of your sales and marketing team. By examining who converts the most leads, you’ll have a valuable yardstick to measure the success of your staff and learn from their performance.
2) Call Recording
At some point, an automated voice has probably told you that “this call may be recorded for quality assurance.” While that message might be annoying when you’re on hold with your car insurance company, the principle behind it could be a valuable addition to your business.
By incorporating call recording with your call tracking program, you’ll be able to gain useful insights into how sales tactics (and salespeople) are turning those calls into customers.
You can determine whether or not your team is asking the right questions to qualify a lead or close a sale, and use the results to train your staff to effectively complete these critical tasks while the lead is on the phone.
3) Connect Calls to Keyword Searches
We’ve written at length on this blog about the importance of making your website adaptable for mobile devices. Last year Google announced that mobile searches have overtaken desktop-based queries, and online marketers have had to adapt to this new reality.
Tracking calls empowers businesses who want to know if they are getting leads from mobile searches, as well as which keywords are behind those searches. This information will help your online marketing team further refine their strategy — and, over time, increase your ROI.
4) Compare Advertising Channels
Much like connecting calls to keywords, trackable phone numbers make it possible to measure the performance of every advertising channel you invest in.
If your company is running radio ads, for example, the unique phone number associated with those ads will show you how well that ad is serving your company relative to your budget for the campaign. If that ad is producing fewer conversions than, say, online marketing, you’ll be able to reallocate your spending toward more successful channels instead of throwing good money after bad.
5) You Don’t Have to Change What You’re Doing
Perhaps the most convenient benefit of call tracking is that your company doesn’t have to do anything different. Your business will still get calls — even more calls, in fact — and your sales team can follow the same script that they currently use to close deals.
The sales process might change as you put what you have learned from call tracking into practice, but these changes will be based in measurable data and can be verified through improvements in your conversion rate.
