Nowadays, digital marketers have access to an unprecedented range of technological tools. Among the most important of these is call tracking technology. While it’s easy to think of digital marketing as something which takes place via a computer or mobile-phone screen, the enduring role of phone calls should not be neglected.
When most customers want something done urgently, they pick up the phone. Businesses which don’t handle such calls well, and fail to learn from them, are missing a valuable opportunity. Call-tracking is the process of tracing a phone call, and determining how the person made it came to do so. The data it provides can help decision-makers in a business to make informed calls about the future.
So what can call-tracking do that other methods can’t?
Attributes success to the correct channels
For agencies marketing on a single channel on behalf of a client, it can be difficult to determine the exact source of the successful conversion. Call tracking provides a means of filling in the gaps in your knowledge, building a more complete picture where the successes and failures lie.
Measuring quality as well as quantity
It’s easy to be seduced by metrics. If your click-through rate and volume of calls is rising, it can be easy to assume that the campaign is successful. But if those calls aren’t translating into sales, then these efforts aren’t especially worthwhile. A good call tracker will provide a means of assigning each call a subjective rating based on a handler’s opinion of the likelihood of success. This information can help to fill in gaps in your knowledge, and to troubleshoot potential problems in the funnel.
Creates Cohesion
Too often, there’s a divide between the sales and digital teams of a given company. The right call-tracker provides both teams with access to the same valuable data, and helps them to co-operate without standing on one another’s toes.
Tracking individual clients
It can often be tricky to trace a successful phone call to a given online channel. Good call tracking software will get around this by generating a unique extension for every lead presented on a screen – that way you’ll be able to see which online channels linked to the conversions via telephone.
Tracking offline campaigns
The same approach can be applied to offline campaigns, like leafleting. Use a different phone number on your flyers, business cards and menus, and you’ll be able to determine which of these approaches is actually driving sales, and which can be shifted away from.
Different businesses may uncover vastly different results when they begin to untangle the channels that lead to successful conversions, and there can be no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. The data provided by call tracking will help business owners to approach this task with their eyes open.
