Call Tracking Opportunities in 2017
As 2016 winds down and we look towards 2017, it’s important to consider what opportunities are available to make improvements to your marketing campaigns and strategies.
Call Tracking is one of those opportunities and presents a number of opportunities within that you may want to consider.
Phone calls are often the missing metric in the path to conversion. As up to 49% of all conversions happening offline, the phone call is a lead source you simply cannot ignore. With the explosion of mobile devices over the past decade, research suggest that by 2019 over 160 billion phone calls will be made to businesses, a staggering increase on the 2014 number of 74 billion.
So don’t simply rely on measuring conversions from your web forms – track the phone calls your business receives and analyse and attribute the source of the calls accurately so you improve your campaigns for optimal performance.
How good is it when you land on a website and the entire experience – the content, the images and videos, the links, the ads, the banners, the phone numbers – is relevant to the product or service you are searching for?
This is called personalization and marketers have been increasingly using this to improve web page conversions by using data gained from the website user’s online activity.
However the phone call plays an important role too as the data collected from a phone call – the keyword the caller searched for, the ad clicked on, the web page the caller first landed on, the city or state called from, the duration of the call – can be used alongside online activity data to personalize the web page content.
This can be taken even further and the call information collected can be used to better route callers to the most appropriate store, call center, dealership or agent.
For example:
- If the caller is from a particular state, the call can be routed to a particular shop, dealership or agent in that state.
- If the caller has searched for ‘Apple iPhone’, the caller may be routed to an agent who specializes in iPhone sales.
- If the caller has had previously long call durations (potentially indicating a high intent to purchase) the caller may be routed to a team who specialise at converting callers into customers.
Essentially, the data can be used as a way of further qualifying the lead so the most appropriate person in the organization can speak to the caller and increase the chances of converting them into a customer.
It’s important to ensure you are capturing 100% of the call conversion and attribution data so that campaign budgets can be more accurately optimized.
By using data sets captured by call tracking such as the keyword searched for, the city called from and the call duration, campaign optimization becomes a whole lot easier and more accurate as you have more data to work with.
Furthermore, by combining this data with CRM data such as sales data, you can drive campaign optimisation based on actual business outcomes, rather than making assumptions of what a conversion is.