The Future is Calling
In our technology-focused digital age, businesses can be forgiven if they become disoriented by the endless tools at their disposal to reach consumers: content marketing, social media, pay-per-click, the list goes on and on. But multiple recent studies have shown that there is one simple metric that is consistently useful and effective: the inbound call.
Smartphones and the popularity of click-to-call from mobile search have tuned the inbound call into a wellspring of opportunity for businesses. A study from Google(1) revealed that 61% of consumers think that it is “very” or “extremely” important to be able to call a business during the purchase phase. Businesses concur: a BIA/Kelsey survey(2) showed that over 66% of small businesses rate the quality of leads from calls as “good” or “excellent.” A quote from Gregg Johnson in the Harvard Business Review(3) sums up the benefits of calls: “communicating by voice is faster, easier, and more effective than typing messages back and forth.”
With the clear benefits of calls, it is necessary for businesses to have the ability to effectively manage their incoming calls and collect all relevant data on their campaigns. By gathering and analyzing this information, businesses can make data-driven decisions to improve their ROI and optimize their call channels.
The Importance of Optimizing Your Call Channels
In order to get the maximum benefit of call tracking, it is important to arrange your call channels so that they are optimized for exposure and data collection.
1. SEO Focus
Consistency in your business listings is key, all beginning with your name, address, and phone number (or NAP). Having these NAP elements listed uniformly across the web is important because it makes it easier for search engines to accurately gauge the web presence of your business. This starts at a local level: getting your business’s NAP information consistent across Google My Business, Yelp, Angie’s List, and other sites will refine the way consumers find your business and provide you with streamlined call tracking insights.
2. Click-to-Call Implementation
The inbound call surge is a direct product of the popularity of Click-to-Call—yet not all businesses have taken advantage of this revolutionary feature on all their digital channels. Click-to-Call presents consumers with a phone number that they can call with a single click right in an ad. This lets them talk to your business immediately instead of having to visit a landing page first; saving precious time and streamlining your sales funnel. Click-to-Call is an integral element for call tracking. Using call tracking software, you can see precisely which ads drive people to use your Click-to-Call button—bringing in useful data that you can compare to other channels in an intuitive dashboard interface.
3. Understanding Your Offline Channels
While digital marketing channels garner a lot of attention, for many businesses using an offline marketing channel is still a reliable way to reach consumers. The use of media like TV, radio, and newspapers, or implementing classic signage on billboards, bus ads, or company vehicles, can certainly bring in a significant number of leads. Call tracking can help a business identify the impact of all their offline channels, giving a clear picture of which methods have proven most effective. Analyzing this data gives you an opportunity to shift your resources so that you can maximize your ROI.
Your Call Data and How to Use it
By optimizing your call channels you can use your customer’s information and analyze where your calls are coming from to make better decisions on what marketing campaigns to allocate your budget to. When you have complete visibility into which marketing campaigns are generating the highest number of leads and conversions, it creates a clear path to getting more out of your marketing dollars.
By implementing a custom IVR and utilizing tracking tools, you can retrieve clearer data from your customers plus filter and direct your calls more effectively—all while enhancing your customer’s experience. Having access to all of this data allows you to attribute calls to specific marketing efforts, giving you the ability to make more informed decisions on where to channel your resources.
Call Tracking Features and Benefits
Call tracking lets businesses stop flying blind. Gone are the days of guesswork for a company wondering if their new billboard or social campaign was worth the cost. Call tracking gives businesses the opportunity to harness the incredible value of calls and provides access to all kinds of data, right down to which keywords are the strongest drivers of traffic.
1. Capture and Channel
A call tracking platform allows you to capture incoming calls through a fully customized Interactive Voice Response (IVR) that works seamlessly to gather your customer’s information and route calls to the appropriate agents. Through advanced recording features, you can personalize your caller’s experience with professionally recorded messages and advanced voice recognition AI-technology that accurately understands and records your customer’s speech.
Voice recognition software helps to identify, differentiate and verify the voice of your customers, creating a seamless and highly customizable experience that enables you to get the information needed to route and track the call more effectively. By utilizing a customizable advanced filtration system, channeling and automatic call back features, routing high call traffic volumes automatically is easier and gives you complete control your call flow.
2. Track and Analyze
Call Tracking empowers you with more visibility into your calls and where they are coming from. By tracking campaigns with custom toll-free numbers and local vanity phone numbers, you will have greater insight into building more effective campaigns and increasing revenue. Through tracking advertisement performances and customer details, you can keep track of detailed customer behavior while making clear-eyed decisions on how to drive your traffic and optimize your ROI.
3. Optimize and Convert
With Call Tracking you can collect visitor data and call information in real-time, giving you the reports necessary to make immediate optimizations. Advanced visual analytics reveal complete insight into your call leads details, while providing comparison data and more predictive outcomes.
Optimize both inbound and outbound calls, while building better partnerships between you and your vendors and customers. Utilize a complete call solution with critical metrics and analytics to enhance your marketing performance and guarantee quality assurance.
Utilize Call Tracking for More Effective Campaigns as an Affiliate
As an Affiliate, utilizing call tracking can help you make better decisions on where to allocate your marketing spend, while also giving you more channels to monetize your traffic.
- Track your campaigns from click to conversion
- Track multiple campaigns and analyze all your data in one platform
- Optimize and allocate your spend based on real-time analytics and market trends
- Target your audiences with greater efficiency
- Create multiple channels to distribute calls between buyers
Call Tracking Benefits for an Affiliate Network
For Affiliate Networks, utilizing Call Tracking for campaign tracking and call distribution is imperative for optimizing ROI.
- Track campaigns and lead quality from publishers
- Utilize ping tree logic for call routing
- Build custom IVRs for sophisticated filtration
- Analyze the success of your IVR and fine-tune it based on reporting
- Drive and route calls to top performers to increase conversions
- Optimize conversion between sources and buyers
How Call Tracking Can Improve Your ROI as a Direct Advertiser
For Direct Advertisers, whether you are performing direct marketing, utilizing affiliates, overseeing an affiliate network, or all of the above, call tracking provides the ultimate routing, tracking, and visualizations needed to optimize your campaigns and increase conversions and ROI.
- Track incoming calls from all of your marketing campaigns with unique vanity numbers
- Build a custom IVR to filter and route calls to appropriate agents
- Monetize on decline traffic by distributing those calls to other buyers
- Analyze quality and conversion rates from Publishers and Affiliate Networks
- Analyze and optimize your campaigns and call routing in real-time to increase your ROI
- Integrate with other internal systems to have enhanced visibility and increased workflow
Conclusion
A call tracking platform lets you track and manage your business calls more effectively. With detailed insights into your caller’s behavior and demographics, you can make smarter, more targeted decisions to optimize your marketing campaigns.
Each call is loaded with information about your customers and target audience. While gathering this data for you, Call Tracking also provides you with intuitive reports and visuals to help you and your team evaluate and take action on your campaigns. With extensive knowledge of market trends, you’ll have a clear competitive edge for future campaigns.
About Phonexa
Phonexa is a marketing hub that gives businesses access to all the tools they need to run and optimize their campaigns. Our platform brings together multiple marketing channels to create a more efficient workflow, all while collecting campaign data so companies can get the most from their marketing efforts.
Phonexa’s Call Logic platform collects data on all your inbound marketing calls and uses sophisticated analytics, which can help you boost your existing sales applications and improve your marketing ROI with data-driven decision making.
(1)The Role of Click to Call In the Path to Purchase
Google / Ipsos, September 2013
(2)PHONE CALLS ARE THE NEW CLICK
BIA Kelsey / Bandwidth, April 2014
(3)Your Customers Still Want to Talk to a Human Being
By Gregg Johnson, The Harvard Business Review, July 26, 2017
Get in touch! We are available 24/7.
