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The modern buying journey is more complex than ever. Research shows customers have between 20 to 500 touchpoints with a brand before they make a purchase! In today’s omnichannel world, these touchpoints run the gamut from online interactions like search ads and website visits to traditional media like television and print ads to analog interactions like phone calls and store visits.
To optimize customer acquisition and lifetime value, marketers need to be able to track and optimize the entire buying journey. However, our new research report found that only 28% of companies are confident that they understand their customers’ full buying journey.
In this post, we’ll break down the benefits of connecting the buying journey, as well as the challenges marketers face. We’ll also dive into how to overcome those challenges with a revenue execution platform. Keep reading to learn more!
Connecting the buying journey offers several marketing benefits that can significantly enhance a brand's ability to engage, convert, and retain customers. Here are some key advantages:
Our recent research survey found five major barriers marketers face when attempting to connect the buying journey. We’ll delve into them below:
While most marketers have sophisticated tracking for the online conversions their campaigns drive, many lack attribution for a critical piece of the puzzle: phone calls. This can create issues because phone calls are often the most valuable conversions your marketing drives. Research shows that phone leads convert to revenue 10-15x more than web leads. In addition, caller retention rate is 28% higher than web lead retention rate, resulting in higher customer lifetime value. If you’re not accounting for the phone leads your campaigns generate, you could significantly underreport your ROI and make the wrong optimizations.
Not only that, but when you neglect phone calls, you miss customer experience issues that harm your conversion rates. For example, you could spend thousands of dollars driving calls on Google Ads, but if your contact center isn’t properly staffed, many of those calls could go unanswered, wasting your budget. Or, the calls may be improperly routed, resulting in unnecessary transfers and long hold times that lead to caller abandonment. It’s also possible that your contact center agents aren’t trained properly to close the leads or are using ineffective scripts. If you don’t connect phone calls to the buying journey, you’ll miss these issues, sending leads into a leaky funnel and wasting your ad spend.
In the following sections, we’ll show you how you can get attribution for the phone leads your marketing programs drive.
Revenue execution platforms like Invoca help companies connect that elusive phone call data to the online buying journey. This allows marketers to tie their investments directly to the revenue they generate in the contact center, helping them make smarter optimization decisions.
Below, we’ll walk you through the key ways revenue execution platforms can help you understand and improve the buying journey for your customers.
If you’re not accounting for the phone leads your marketing campaigns drive, you’re missing out on a key piece of the customer journey, since phone calls convert to revenue at a high rate. As a result, you’re likely significantly underreporting your ROI.
With an AI-powered revenue execution platform like Invoca, you can track which channels and campaigns drive phone leads and conversions in the contact center. This allows your marketing team to benchmark its full ROI — including offline conversions. When it comes time to defend your budget to the leadership team, you’ll be glad to have this data in hand!
Once you’ve begun to track the entire buying journey — including phone call conversions — you can make smarter optimization decisions. For example, you can allocate more of your budget to the channels, campaigns, and keywords driving conversions — both online and over the phone. You can also improve your efficiency by cutting spend on underperforming campaigns.
Invoca customers like Rogers Communications found that the platform more than pays for itself with the new advertising efficiencies they unlocked. Read the full case study here.
The days of one-size-fits-all customer experiences are over — research from McKinsey shows that 71% of people expect personalization from the brands they buy from. If you fail to make your customers feel valued and known, you risk losing them to a competitor who will.
That’s where revenue execution platforms come in — they use AI to capture insights from an often overlooked part of the customer journey: contact center phone conversations. You can then stream the conversation data into your CRM and digital advertising tools to inform personalization.
For example, you can retarget callers with ads for the products or services they mentioned over the phone, touting the value propositions they mentioned. To preserve your budget, you can also suppress callers who purchased over the phone from seeing future ads for the same product. This personalized approach will make your customers feel appreciated and understood.
Our research found that 76% of customers stop doing business with a company after just one bad experience. Therefore, creating a seamless buying journey that delights customers is critical. While most marketers have the online journey to a science, many neglect the offline journey that occurs when a customer calls the contact center or business location.
Revenue execution platforms give your marketing team a complete view of the phone call experience. You can generate reports showing how many of your marketing phone leads go unanswered and how many go unconverted. You can also dive into phone call transcripts to pinpoint customer experience issues leading to low conversion rates.
This visibility allows you to quickly pinpoint customer experience issues and collaborate with your contact center team to correct them before they cost you revenue.
You may believe that, as a marketer, the contact center falls outside your jurisdiction. However, the marketing team is responsible for ensuring every aspect of the customer experience is seamless — including the phone call experience. Revenue execution platforms give you the tools to not only analyze the phone call experience, but improve it as well.
For example, you can use Invoca’s intelligent call routing to send callers to the best available agent based on their online journey before they placed the phone call. In addition, Invoca PreSense gives contact center agents insights about the caller’s digital journey before the call begins so they can serve them better. This allows agents to greet callers by name, pull up relevant information, and dive right into the customer’s issue without delay.
These tools are 100% cloud-based, meaning they’re easily compatible with your contact center’s existing infrastructure.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you connect and optimize the entire buying journey? Check out these resources:
