
Call tracking helps reduce that annoying Vegas feeling
Call tracking helps reduce that annoying Vegas feeling
John Wanamaker, the retail pioneer in the 19th century, is said to have said, “I know 50% of my ads are lost. My problem? I don’t know which half works.”
You’re not alone if checking your advertising budget makes you feel like Wanamaker is expressing frustration with the lack of clarity about which advertising and marketing programs should take credit for lead generation and sales.
Capturing Jeff Kärcher’s message to avoid gambling with your marketing spend , I’d like to introduce the use of phone call referral to help you turn the odds in your favour.
Kärcher Group Traffic Manager, Lianne Weeks Explains How CallTrackingMetrics – A Call Tracking Software Group – helps our team and customers better attribute success and failure by using precisely which ads lead to phone calls.
“One of the most important skills at TKG is the ability to track the success of the work we do for our clients. Increased traffic is a key indicator; in the end, it comes down to the question “Have we increased business for a customer?” On an e-commerce site, it is easy to measure. We can To look at sales.But for non-websites, our job is to generate leads.
Completing forms on websites is one way we help generate leads, but phone calls are also key. Believe it or not, people are still actually picking up the phone!!Even sites that offer online ordering often have a strong component of direct selling or sales assistance via incoming phone calls.
Call tracking gives us that piece of the referral marketing puzzle that was previously missing.”
Understand the importance of phone calls
Over the years, we’ve had a digital marketing agency that has encouraged and assisted clients in monitoring channels that contributed online sales and model-based leads through Google Analytics and asking people over the phone how they discovered their business. The use of call referral analytics was driven by the fact that in providing marketing services to manufacturing companies , more than half of the incoming leads of some customers came by phone.
“Nearly half of our customers are on the phone to check production lead times,” one customer shared during the strategy session, adding, “Many calls for customization information and then submit a quote request online themselves.”
TKG wanted to find out which ad channels – from Facebook to Google to Bing to ThomasNet – offer the most phone conversions and therefore the greatest return on investment. By connecting dozens of numbers they assigned to different campaigns across multiple channels, we can track which sources – and specific campaigns from those sources – that were contributing to our customers’ phone calls and conversions.
Referring phone calls tells a different story about the sources that drive people who prefer calling over the phone. Similar to using “live chat” profiles for custom manufacturers and service providers, referral of a call source helps provide insight into changing how customers are advertised and how money is allocated.
Dynamic number entry
Similar to filtering out website visitors who complete an online sale or fill out a form, call tracking analytics ask in your marketing campaign data to specifically focus not on all visits to the website but isolate only those that lead to a phone call.
Call tracking for marketing provides real-time referral to many potential advertising sources – organic listings in search engines, PPC (pay-per-click advertising), referral from partner websites, social media, and direct customer sources (think postcards with a title URL: exampleSite.com/special-offer).
One of the most common questions we get when discussing ad and referral source tracking is: “How are the numbers changing?”
A range of phone numbers, each attributed to a different advertising medium, are available to be displayed on your website. With forwarding, all phone calls are ringed directly to our client companies’ phone lines; The secret is to use a small script in the code of all pages on the site.
Depending on how the website visitor originally connected to the website, a different phone number is displayed sitewide during the entire visitor session. Dynamic number insertion matches a phone call to its original source – showing channels, campaigns, and even keywords that attract qualified leads and convert sales.
Customer satisfaction and call center training
“This call may be recorded for training and quality purposes.” We’ve all become familiar with this opening line when making a call. In addition to identifying the original media source, call analysis toolkits can also record incoming phone calls.
Call tracking analytics allow us to better understand which successful campaigns lead to phone calls that generate sales; Listening to playback of recorded calls can give your management team valuable data points to help you improve and improve your business beyond advertising that extends to sales.
In cases where the sales department listens to recorded calls, it provides useful information for both sides of the conversation – your customers’ interest/intent levels, and how salespeople handle incoming calls.
Using recorded calls to improve the quality of calls with your telephone sales reps while desirable can encounter resistance on the part of call center employees who are concerned about feeling watched. The CallTrackingMetrics blog has included a case study that can be useful to any company that receives incoming calls.
The article quotes a sales manager whose team that was answering the phones in the beginning has gone from feeling very independent to feeling watched now.
Her solution, detailed in the case study, was to require phone agents to only send two recordings each day – a 1-star call and a 5-star call. The one-star calls were calls in which the agent felt he could have performed better had he had better tools, more power, etc.; It was a 5 star call which went well.
“I shared that I wouldn’t listen to anything else, and that made them very comfortable and they started seeing the value of call recording. Now I had a vision of what they needed to train on and I had something I could come up with, as we worked together to improve from a 25% conversion rate, to a conversion rate 35%, with an end goal of a 50% conversion rate.”
Call analytics software can also use the recordings to help isolate specific conversations for further evaluation. Calls can be flagged in the system based on specific products mentioned, or the caller’s use of expressions such as “need pricing” or “get a quote”.
The key here is to develop a mutual understanding with phone representatives that the company can repurpose those calls in the future when bringing in new employees.
50/50 or 80/20?
It can easily be demonstrated that the best ROI comes from focused advertising spend based on knowledge of the programs that attract leads and sales. In certain cases, a very small percentage of your current and potential customers may represent a very large percentage of your company’s profitability.
The ability to focus – and increase your marketing resources – on top-performing customers and the associated marketing spend can fundamentally transform your marketing success.
The Karcher Group prides itself on continuing to focus on the metrics that matter most to your company – leads and real, actionable sales.
Get in touch to find out how TKG can help you improve your return on investment by removing underperforming or underperforming parts of your marketing investment.