When we’re looking for information nowadays, the first place most of us go is to our phones. Studies show that most of us prefer to research products or services thoroughly online before ultimately making the decision to purchase something. These studies also indicate that consumers typically prefer more personalized experiences before deciding to buy something (particularly if it’s something large or significant). In fact, 65% of consumers say they would rather contact a business directly by phone when push comes to shove. However, unlike easily trackable website traffic, phone calls are often the end of the data trail used to understand your customer’s journey and experience.
Fortunately for us marketers, there’s Call Tracking. We’re here to show you how tracking your customer’s and lead’s calls can have enormous benefits for your business–from directly connecting phone calls to campaign performance, to gleaning important information about your customers, or analyzing your sales staff’s performance, Call Tracking gives you the tools you need to improve your campaigns over time.
What is Call Tracking? How Does it Work?
Call tracking software supports marketers by assigning unique, trackable phone numbers which are differentiated by traffic source (e.g., organic traffic, social, paid traffic, etc.) or by a specific marketing activity (e.g., your advertising campaigns or pages on your website). This way, you can understand how your phone-based customers came into your funnel, and analyze the efficacy of your marketing efforts.
Most Call Tracking programs work by placing a simple JavaScript code into your website HTML that automatically replaces your fixed business numbers with traceable, dynamic phone numbers specific to each site visitor. These unique call tracking numbers then become identifiers for a website visitor’s session or for their click on one of your ads. Just like magic!
Call Tracking and the Customer Journey
One of the benefits of digital advertising and search engine marketing is that leads are relatively easy to track, both by demographics and by the queries, keywords, and campaigns that brought them to your page. It also helps you get the full picture of their customer journey, all the way from awareness to conversion, allowing you to understand how your business is performing and to refine and optimize the customer journey where needed.
It used to be that customers who came to you by phone fell into the proverbial data black hole, but Call Tracking enables you to understand just as much–if not more–about your phone leads (and their journeys) as you do about your digital leads.
Let’s Look at the Metrics
Since Call Tracking software assigns unique numbers to specific marketing tactics, it allows you to see where a customer is coming from, thus helping you understand how the customer became aware of your business in the first place and what tactics are working well (or aren’t). By tying that unique identifying number to a particular campaign, you can learn:
- The number of calls coming in from specific campaigns
- What ads, offers, or other strategies are providing brand new leads
- Call location and time
- Keywords that drove the leads to your site
- Landing page performance
- Lead quality
Beyond awareness-stage leads, you can also follow the lead or customer journey even further, and understand what preferences they choose, where their call is routed within your organization, and (with some call tracking software options) even record or monitor conversations between your staff and customers.
Personalizing Customer Experience with Call Tracking
Call Tracking can do a lot more for your business beyond providing campaign performance data. Because call tracking software can give you real-time data about your phone leads, including location, keyword interests, and previous engagements with your business, your customer service representatives or sales staff can make more connections with them and tailor their experience with your company. Your staff can then communicate exactly the right messaging to the customer by answering their most relevant questions and connecting them with the product or service they’re looking for.
Additionally, some Call Tracking software can record or transcribe your employees’ interactions with customers and even parse out keywords or phrases using artificial intelligence so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time digging through transcriptions and recordings for key pieces of information about the customer experience. Understanding what your call handlers are doing–both right and wrong–can help you make improvements, offer applicable training sessions, and generally improve and streamline the interactions between your business and your customers.
The Takeaways
Call Tracking is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers, giving you a wealth of information about your customers and leads to help you understand the value of your marketing efforts and provides you with data that will help tailor those efforts in the future. By using Call Tracking to optimize your paid search advertising and other digital marketing tactics, and personalize your customers’ experiences, you’re likely to see higher conversion rates and more satisfied customers. Win win.
Want to learn more about how to optimize and drive conversions from your landing pages? Check out our guide, 12 Steps to a Better Converting Landing Page here:
About VONT Performance Digital Marketing
At VONT we believe that change is the only constant in the digital world – and that excites us. When tools and environments are constantly changing, new opportunities to help our clients achieve success are constantly arising. Each new advertising technology, social platform, or design approach allows us to improve on the results we achieve for our clients.
We believe in this idea of continual fine-tuning so much that we named our company VONT, which means to achieve exponential improvement in incremental steps. It is our core belief, and the reason why we are not simply a web design company or simply a digital advertising agency, but rather a long-term, single source partner providing a comprehensive array of web development and digital marketing capabilities.
