Digital marketers and sales professionals rely on a wealth of online data, from clicks to impressions, to determine success. While online information portrays a campaign’s progress, it fails to capture offline data, such as customer phone calls.
Considering that 59% of customers would rather call a company because they need a quick answer and 57% call to talk to a real person, focusing on only digital metrics leaves out a significant portion of a company’s leads.
By not accurately reporting phone leads, companies fall victim to inaccurate reporting and misallocated marketing funds, which leaves their sales team grasping for customer data.
In this guide, we’ll explain:
- What call tracking is
- 4 key benefits associated with call tracking
- 3 ways you can leverage call tracking today
What Is Call Tracking?
By definition, call tracking is the practice of using unique toll-free or vanity phone numbers to identify and report where customers found your business information.
Without this in place, companies do not know where customer phone calls originated from. They could have seen your phone number on a Google Maps listing, flyer, or social media profile, and your sales team would have no idea.
A HubSpot study discovered that 48% of customers prefer to use the phone to communicate with companies. Are you OK with not knowing how nearly half of your customers found your business?
Call tracking companies provide businesses with a series of unique vanity or toll-free numbers to use as they wish. With call tracking numbers, you can easily associate a phone call with a specific marketing campaign, medium, or location.
When customers find and call these specific phone numbers, a business knows exactly where the call came from and can update the information in its customer relationship management (CRM) system or marketing software accordingly.
For instance, let’s say your company uses an 800 number on a billboard. Every time a customer calls that particular number, you know exactly how they found out about your business. There’s no guesswork, and your team can accurately attribute that lead to the right marketing campaign.
4 Critical Call Tracking Benefits
1. Determine How Customers Found You
We’ve all called a business for information and have been asked, “How did you find out about us?”
Rather than having your customer service team pine for answers, you’ll already know what medium or campaign the customer came from, thanks to the call tracking number. And, with this information handy, your sales team can use it to their advantage as they speak with the customer.
2. Accurate ROI Reporting
Without information about where your offline leads came from, how accurate is your campaign’s return on investment calculation?
By understanding exactly where each lead came from, your marketing and sales team can have a comprehensive view of how well certain marketing channels are performing.
For example, your pay-per-click ads may appear to be underperforming if you only review the online analytics. But once you include the number of phone leads generated from the campaign, you’ll get the full view of the results. Who knows, maybe the ads drove hundreds of calls and only a few clicks!
3. Proper Allocation of Funds
After you’ve correctly calculated ROI and identified top and underperforming marketing channels using call tracking, you will have a better understanding of where to allocate your marketing budget.
Depending on your company’s financial situation, wasting money on underperforming or failing efforts is the last thing you want to do. Analyzing your call tracking leads, along with online leads, will help you determine where your marketing dollars are best spent.
4. Stronger Customer Relationships
Call tracking phone numbers offer call recording features. With this capability, sales teams can go back and comb through customer conversations for pertinent information that can help strengthen the customer’s relationship with the company and close the sale.
You can’t do that with online analytics alone!
3 Ways to Implement Call Tracking Today
Thanks to call tracking’s versatile nature, businesses have a wealth of possibilities at their fingertips. Once you set up your company’s call tracking system, try it out with these three tactics:
1. Offline Marketing Campaigns
Although digital marketers may not want to believe it, offline tactics, such as phone calls, convert leads into revenue 10–15 times more than online leads.
Assign a toll-free call tracking number to each offline advertising or promotional campaign your company runs. Doing so will help you understand which offline tactics work best to drive customers to your business.
Common offline marketing tactics include:
- Print marketing
- Outdoor advertising
- Events/sponsorships
- Business cards
- Networking events
2. A/B Testing
While PPC, social media, and email marketing platforms provide analytics for A/B tests run on their sites, they don’t account for leads that call.
Include unique call tracking numbers on each version of your online ad. At the end of the test, factor in the phone leads generated from each ad. The ad that drove the most number of leads overall is the winner!
3. Monitor Multiple Locations
If you own a franchise or multiple business locations, it’s important to understand which location is performing the best and which needs a bit of help.
Using call tracking, you can determine:
- The peak call hours for each business/office location
- How long customer service reps at each location talk with customers
- Which location receives the most number of customer calls
With call tracking capabilities, you can take your multiple business locations to new heights.
Add Call Tracking to Your Marketing and Sales Efforts Today
Now that you know what call tracking is, how to use it, and what advantages you can expect, it’s time to implement it into your marketing and sales teams. Sign up today!
