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Digital marketers are always looking for new ways to increase customer acquisition rates. Sometimes the best solutions are right in front of your face … or next to your ear. Phone calls are an untapped opportunity for growth. When you understand who’s calling your business and why, you have new insights to optimize campaign performance, improve the customer experience, and ultimately drive more sales.
You’ve no doubt spent a lot of time and money optimizing for digital conversions. Why wouldn’t you do the same for phone calls?
Customer acquisition is a top priority. eMarketer reports 77% of inbound marketers and 68% of outbound marketers said converting contacts and leads into customers was their top marketing priority. And as you can imagine, a big chunk of marketing dollars goes toward it. According to a 2015 survey of U.S. marketers, 58% spent the most on prospecting and converting new customers.
Marketers are focusing their energy and budgets on acquisition while battling major flaws in their strategy -- especially around data. Despite all the tools available to marketers, many still don’t have a complete view of the customer journey. In fact, only 30% of marketers say they have a thorough, up-to-date view of the customer journey. Only 38% say they only have a good view of the customer journey with gaps and/or timeliness issues.
There is also a huge disconnect between marketing priorities and capabilities. The truth is 84% of companies consider tracking marketing conversions a high priority, but only 10% actually have the capability to track conversion events.
For companies that do significant business over the phone, call tracking is key to overcoming these hurdles. Call tracking gives marketers the data and tools to track when and why customers pick up the phone and what happens on those calls. Marketers can tap into these insights to drive greater customer acquisition. Here’s how:
Call tracking allows you to see when customers convert over the phone, so you know the media and marketing campaigns that are working and how to optimize them. Whether a customer calls directly from an ad, or clicks through to a landing page, you can connect phone calls and sales back to the digital journey.
Once you have a complete view of what efforts are producing the most online and phone conversions, you can effectively optimize search, social and display ads, landing pages, emails, your website, and media spend.
As a marketer, your job isn’t done once a call is placed. You can use call tracking to identify problems in the caller experience. Dropped calls or unhappy callers are often due to calls not being routed to the correct person or department, long hold times, confusing phone menus, or problems with the sales process. Call tracking gives you the tools to address these problems so you can convert more callers.
For example, you can use clues from a caller’s digital journey to route them to the right destination in real time. What products/services did they search for before placing a call? What landing page did they click through on? All these online touchpoints can help you tailor the caller experience so your callers speak to the right agent every time. You can also arm your sales agents with caller demographic and profile information so they can have effective conversations that drive sales.
Call tracking isn’t just about increasing phone calls and improving the caller experience -- it’s about the entire customer journey. With call tracking, you can easily track the intent and outcome of a call to actually improve and personalize all other digital marketing touchpoints. For unconverted calls, you can create personalized follow-up email campaigns or retargeting ads that feature products/services discussed over the phone. You could even include discount codes to motivate the consumer to make a purchase.
By tracking the intent and outcome of a call, you can also target converted caller with upsell or cross-sell offers. For example, the next time a caller visits your website, you can display a banner ad that features a complementary product to the one they purchased over the phone. You can also create an email campaign featuring products mentioned in their conversation with a sales rep.
Call tracking also comes with tons of demographic and psychographic information about your customers. You can use this information to enhance your customers’ profiles and improve audience segmentation and targeting.
Without new customers, a business cannot succeed. And without a comprehensive view of the customer and their online/offline journey, you can’t effectively acquire new customers. So as you evaluate your marketing mix, make sure you include phone calls and call tracking to ensure your business has all the information it needs effectively convert customers.
If you want to learn more about how phone calls fit into today's digital customer journey, download Invoca's Call Intelligence Index.
