How did Halfords Autocentre connect their customers’ online journeys to thousands of daily offline phone conversions?

The driving force behind building the link between digital spend and high-value phone calls.

I cannot overstate what great partners Infinity have been...

The challenge

As a brand offering an enormous range of products and services for a broad audience all over the country, Halfords Autocentre estimate that almost 50% of their customers research online, purchase offline (ROPO) via the phone.

But without being able to connect the online journey to their thousands of daily offline phone conversions, an optimum digital strategy cannot be developed. Without understanding what activity was having a commercial impact and improving the customer experience, Halfords risked missing opportunities to generate revenue at a crucial time.

Why Infinity

Having considered using free platforms, Halfords decided that only a call tracking solution able to provide a more comprehensive view of the end-to-end customer journey would be useful. This where Infinity enters the picture.

As a company with many phone numbers across their autocentre network, and a comprehensive range of products on their website, Halfords required the devotion and guidance of Infinity’s Customer Success team throughout the planning and onboarding phase.

Ryan Vince, Head of Marketing and Digital at Halfords Autocentre, had also had a hugely positive experience with Infinity in a previous enterprise role, giving him the confidence to implement Infinity at Halfords too.

The solution

Halfords used Infinity’s extensive integrations with the Google suite to build a clear bridge between digital spend and phone conversions, a crucial element in understanding the ROPO customer journey. An initial rollout to 30 autocentres was soon expanded to the entire network of over 300 once the benefits of this insight became clear.

As well as understanding which PPC and display campaigns were contributing to successful phone conversions, Halfords also began to look at the pages on their site where conversions leapt up when a phone number was displayed, and conducted other tests to improve the customer journey.

They also noticed that a high percentage of their calls came from Google My Business, emphasising the importance of building strong local profiles for all autocentres. This was even more important with the COVID-19 outbreak, when phone calls spiked due to people needing urgent work on their vehicles but wanting reassurance about what was open and the safety measures at specific autocentres.

The results

The COVID-19 outbreak meant that Halfords needed to identify immediate opportunities to impact conversions from their digital activity. In the first two months of using Infinity, Halfords was able to glean the following key strategic insights:

• Identified and optimised key pages with far higher phone conversions
• Expanded click-to-call campaigns due to proof from Infinity that they were working
• Pinpointed pages where adding a phone number boosted conversions
• Proved the scale of ROPO revenue, highlighting where to focus improvements
• 2x the amount of customer journeys that can be analysed

In the future, Halfords are looking to explore further insights delivered by Infinity by conducting conversion tests across more parts of their website to aid their growth after COVID-19. They are also looking to take advantage of more of Infinity’s integrations, as well as using Conversation Analytics to help guide the buying experience on their website.

What the client says

I cannot overstate what great partners Infinity have been, their help in onboarding, project scoping, and understanding our challenges have been second to none. They have been immensely supportive during what has been an unprecedented time for all of us, helped us gather genuinely useful insights in a short time, and I look forward to seeing what we can do in the future.Ryan Vince | Head of Marketing & Digital, Halfords Autocentres