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When it comes to spending your money on martech, there are nice-to-haves and must-haves. The nice-to-haves make your life a little easier, like a new project management tool or cold brew on tap. While you can’t get by without caffeine, you can always go to Starbucks, and project management can be handled with a free-to-cheap tool for many teams. The bottom line is, it’s hard to quantify how the nice-to-haves impact the bottom line. Then there’s your must-have marketing tools like email automation, web analytics, CRM, and call tracking software. Now, I didn’t just throw call tracking in there because it happens to be what we do. If you spend any portion of your marketing budget driving inbound sales calls, I guarantee you that you’re throwing a good chunk of your money away if you don’t have the proper analysis tools.
Here’s why call tracking is a must-have piece of your martech stack.
If you aren’t getting attribution for sales that happen on the phone that are driven by your marketing efforts, who’s getting credit for it? It could be the call center, it could be nobody. Either way, it’s impossible to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts that drive sales calls if your data trail goes cold when your leads pick up the phone. Maybe you can make correlations to increased call volume when campaigns are launched, but that would be like counting pageviews as conversions. In any world that would be unacceptable, and there’s no reason why a lack of attribution should be acceptable for calls.
Call tracking software makes it possible for you to get granular attribution for phone calls and conversions that happen on the phone. This means that you have the data required to prove that your marketing is working or to figure out why it isn’t effective. Take for example the conundrum law firm Weitz & Luxenberg faced before it started using Invoca. “I went to the managing partner to talk about what channels were performing best, what was outperforming, we looked at each other and just had no idea. I waved to the hot dog vendor on the corner, and said ‘That guy knows more about his business than we do about ours.’ That’s how little we knew when it came to calls,” said Bill Denninger, Director of Business Operations.
Using Invoca call tracking, they now get that sweet, sweet closed-loop attribution, allowing them to follow clients through the whole funnel and optimize all of their marketing spend. What was once a huge gray area became a 1:1 relationship between marketing dollars spent and clients retained. And that’s not just attribution for digital—Weitz & Luxenberg advertises through the internet, television, radio, magazines—and they now get call attribution for all of these channels. This resulted in a nearly 30% decrease in cost per retainer and a 15% lift in conversion rates.
The average cost per click (CPC) in Google Ads is about $2.30 and cost per action (CPA) is about $59. Multiply that by whatever your click volume is and you have… well, hella money spent on clicks. Bidding on the wrong keywords can cost you dearly, and when it comes to driving phone calls, bad choices can cost your company double. Many advertisers that are new to call tracking learn that they’re bidding on keywords that are driving customer service calls instead of sales, eating up marketing budget and tying up sales call center agents with unwanted callers. If you are counting all calls as conversions, you might actually be chalking up boondoggles like this as successes. Paid search optimization is one of the primary use cases for Invoca because of this very problem and how easy Invoca makes it to fix broken paid search strategies.
Invoca customers typically see a substantial lift in their return on ad spend (ROAS) by using data from phone calls to optimize their paid search strategy. This is often accomplished by increasing bids on keywords that are driving the highest converting calls and stopping bidding on keywords that are either not driving calls or driving the wrong type of calls. Invoca data can be fed into bid management platforms using our integrations with Google Ads, Microsoft Ads (FKA Bing Ads), and Kenshoo, allowing marketers to increase and decrease keyword bids for maximum impact in real time. The bottom line is that you can put more money in the right places and stop wasting ad spend—and this isn’t something you want to wait to do.
How do you test the effectiveness of your ad copy and landing pages? With A/B testing. How do you A/B test the effectiveness of your ad copy and landing pages that drive phone calls without call tracking? You can’t. Call tracking platforms like Invoca give you the ability to perform multivariate testing by giving you call conversion data for ads and landing pages in real time.
A leading storage-on-demand service provider uses Invoca to test optimizations on its landing pages. “We implemented the Invoca platform because we wanted to get away from the guesswork,” said Liora Simozar, senior product manager. Through Invoca, their marketing team can see exactly which landing page variant brought in a customer and look at repeat visitors over time to understand the performance of different variants. “If it wasn’t for Invoca...we would have been unable to evaluate which variant was most successful." If you aren’t testing, you’re guessing. Invoca allows you to put the science back in your strategy.
The data that Invoca gives marketers allows them to optimize their marketing to increase their conversion rates. That may not come as a complete surprise, but many simultaneously discover efficiencies that reducing their cost per conversion. Within 90 days of implementing Invoca, a healthcare customer was able to convert 50 percent more consumers. The call data was key to improving not just call conversion rates, but also on their website and requests made from other digital channels. Using call data from Invoca, the marketing team was able to improve the effectiveness of everything from ad copy and landing pages to the actual handling of the phone calls. This resulted in a 50% increase in conversion rates and a 50% decrease in cost-per-click. Why would you turn down a more-for-less proposition?
When you first say “caller experience” out loud, most marketer’s first thought is “that’s the call center’s responsibility.” Even if you’re bidding on all of the right keywords and dialed in your audiences, a poor call experience can kill conversion rates and make your marketing efforts less effective. Making improvements to the call experience can help you discover and route more of your highest-value customers to the right place faster.
DISH Networks used Invoca to capture a large group of online shoppers who were abandoning their online shopping carts. They were sometimes calling to speak with an agent, but often ended up searching for an alternative provider. In order to get these wayward customers on the phone, DISH integrated Invoca with their website tools to identify customers with a television package in their shopping cart, then use that data to prioritize call routing to the ideal agent, in real time. This data-driven personalization transformed an online conversion experience with a throughput of less than 5% into a phone call that closes in the high 60% range. By using contextual shopping cart data to personalize call routing, DISH made it easier for customers to complete a purchase over the phone while still giving the digital team detailed conversion data. It’s the best of all worlds.
The longer you wait to implement a call tracking and analytics solution, the longer it will take to discover all of the efficiencies it will uncover, and the more money you’ll waste. For companies that rely on inbound calls for revenue, call tracking isn’t just a must-have, it’s a must-have-it-now.
