Marketing is all about the numbers: everything needs to be quantifiable. Today’s CMOs are fighting harder than ever to prove their worth, and are doing so by showing how marketing campaigns are translating into revenue. This means that every lead needs to be accounted for and the sources of the highest-quality leads should receive more of the budget.
Knowing where your best leads come from creates an enormous advantage for marketers. With 66% of businesses considering calls an excellent or good source of leads (BIA Kelsey 2013), knowing where those calls come from is crucial. By adding call data to your arsenal of analytics you have the ability to truly optimize the sources that provide the highest-value leads. If you’re still not convinced, here are the top 8 reasons to include call analytics in your reporting:
1. You’re able to track phone leads back to their source.
When a lead calls your business, what source do you attribute that lead to? Without call tracking, there is no way to attribute these phone leads to their actual source. With so many different sources, attributing each lead to the right one is crucial. Call tracking technology allows you to properly allocate phone calls back to any offline, online, or mobile source, preserving your data integrity.
2. You can spend money on the campaigns that work.
Marketing budgets are formulated to create the highest ROI possible. But do you know which campaigns are truly driving the most revenue? Without knowing what drives calls, you can’t attribute sales opportunities and revenue from those calls back to their source. Adding call data to the rest of your analytics allows you to create a complete picture of where you should be investing your money. This way, you can spend more on programs that are generating revenue, and eliminate the ones that are not.
3. You can unlock the full power of multi-touch attribution.
For the modern marketer, the holy grail of marketing analytics has become multi-touch attribution. It is no longer plausible to give all of the credit to just the first or the last touch point. With all of the different marketing technologies available today, it is now possible to capture each and every interaction your company has with each contact associated to a sales opportunity. The key here is to track every interaction. If you aren’t tracking phone calls, this is not truly multi-touch attribution and you aren’t giving each source and medium the credit they deserve.
4. You’re able to score leads based on what they say.
Keyword spotting technology makes it possible to monitor conversations between callers and agents without listening in on any calls to determine the quality of those calls. Keyword spotting offers enormous potential for optimizing the way that leads are scored, making sure that your sales team only spends their time on the leads with the highest potential of converting to customers. Keyword spotting also gives marketers insight into what campaigns are driving the highest-value leads. This allows marketing decisions to be made on the quality of leads in addition to quantity.
5. You have the power to discover your most effective webpages.
When a lead is on your website, they don’t always want to fill out the contact form. Often times, they decide to call you instead, especially if they are browsing on their smartphones. When this happens, only call analytics can tell you which webpage they called from. Call tracking is also great for A/B testing. With a different phone number on each version of your website, you can determine not only which landing page drove more form fills, but also phone calls.
6. You can optimize your business based on when you get the most calls.
With calls being such an important source of high value leads, it is imperative that your advertising occurs during times that people are most likely to call. This is not just time of day, but also the day of the week. For B2C companies, call volumes might be highest on Saturdays at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. For B2B companies, it is more likely that call volume jumps on Monday mornings. Getting your phone number in front of the consumers’ eyes at the right time can greatly increase the ROI of your campaigns.
7. You can boost the performance of your call center.
Recording inbound calls can provide incredible understanding of how your customers interact with your representatives. This can help you determine not only which agents are your top performers, but also what questions and issues are the most common. Call analytics can help you determine what sales pitches are the most effective and which of your sales representatives are taking the most calls.
8. You’re able to discover the geographic markets that drive the most calls.
Knowing the location of your callers provides numerous advantages for marketers. Geographic marketing unlocks extraordinary potential by finding the locations of your most likely caller. By knowing where to target your efforts, you can greatly increase the conversion rates of your marketing campaigns. With geo-location, the precise location of a caller can be determined through cell phone triangulation. This means that caller can be automatically routed to the store, office, or agent that is closest to them.
Without call analytics, CMOs and marketers are not able to fully prove the value that they are providing to their organizations. Many valuable leads are falling through the marketer’s net because they have no way of attributing phone leads to the campaign that drove those calls. Only with call tracking can you fully close the loop on your marketing and ensure that every marketing-generated lead is fully attributed to marketing. Call analytics will not only benefit your lead attribution, it can have a substantial impact on other areas of your marketing analytics as well. To learn more about how call analytics can improve your marketing, take a look at our white paper, Tracking Phone leads: The Missing Piece of Marketing Automation.
