Now that I've got your attention, the bad news is that this is only going to get worse unless you take action now! So why is this applicable to your business and does it matter anyway as you could question if the landline still has a place in today’s business environment?
As the majority of our business and marketing operations are being moved online, some would argue that the phone has become redundant and yet in reality the statistics tell another story. In a recent survey the telephone received satisfaction rates at 69%, the highest as a communications channel, compared to online channels. In most cases people prefer picking up the telephone and making a call rather than online form filling plus it’s a quicker and more convenient way to find the answers you’re looking for.
Online has a key part to play in the conversion process however even when a prospect has engaged with a piece of digital advertising pointing to an online enquiry form the chances are they will still want to pick up the telephone and speak to someone for reassurance.
So the fundamental question is, if the telephone plays such an important role in the path to purchase, why aren’t more businesses measuring the effectiveness of their calls. This is primarily down to a lack of awareness of how call tracking can be used to boost marketing performance.
So what can call tracking do for your business and how can it be used to boost marketing performance?
1. ROI evaluation for offline and online marketing
Call tracking is still the only solution that can accurately tell you how your offline marketing is performing. By placing unique trackable phone numbers across your marketing, both online and offline, you’ll achieve a comparison of the performance of every single marketing channel.
For instance, if a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign is generating less leads than a print advertising campaign, you might consider adjusting spend on your PPC or revising your choice of target keywords.
Call tracking can easily be integrated with Google Analytics and Google AdWords making it easy to analyse the full picture of conversions and see where ROI is being achieved.
2. Call recording: improve your sales conversations
Call recording can be an incredible asset to your business. It’s only by listening to calls that you can identify any problems in the sales language, whether the message needs to be improved, a lack of knowledge about products or services or areas where staff need more training. Call tracking allows the quality of the conversation and the source of the lead to be recorded and measured, a fundamental requirement when you’re assessing conversion rates.
Making an informed decision about whether a marketing channel is producing quality leads and worth the continued investment can only be properly measured with call tracking.
3. Accurately attribute your leads
Measuring where every lead comes from can be a huge challenge. Conversions and sales are rarely caused by one piece of marketing, neither do they occur on a single visit to a website. User journeys are often highly complicated and influenced by a range of marketing activity across multiple channels.
Another key issue for marketers is being able to attribute which keywords are leading to phone calls and which of these calls are converting. Most conversion tracking is set up to attribute on-site actions to the last visit which in most cases doesn't accurately reflect or value the influence other channels have played in the process. In addition the disconnect in a visitor’s online activity and their offline telephone calls adds yet another layer of complexity to measuring the path to conversion.
With call tracking in place you can accurately measure the visitor’s journey along the path to conversion and gain a greater insight into your consumer’s behaviour. This data can then be used to assess where advertising and marketing spends are best placed to generate high quality leads that convert.
So the next time you close a sale over the phone, if you’re not already call tracking, think about the valuable information you could have learned from tracking that call.
Long live the telephone!
