Proving your value to clients always is at the top of the list for marketing agencies, and there are many powerful tools for tracking your lead generation efforts. Tools like Google’s Universal Analytics are great for tracking web leads, or Salesforce’s CRM platform that can track how these leads progress through the sales funnel, and lastly, optimization platforms like Optimizely that can help you drive more leads from your website. These are just a few of the numerous tools that exist to monitor the success of your online marketing efforts, but most agencies lose track of the most valuable leads at the same exact time: when they pick up the phone.
The Importance of Phone Leads
It’s common thinking that phone calls have grown less important with the rise of the Internet, but it’s actually the opposite. With the uptick in smartphones, there has been a dramatic rise in the amount of calls being placed to businesses. In this years annual State of Marketing Measurement Survey, we found the second-highest rated marketing channel to be inbound phone calls, which placed just behind in-person visits. Without knowing where these high value leads are coming from, how can you truly demonstrate the success of your marketing campaigns?
The right arsenal of tools can help you optimize lead generation and inbound call routing for clients. Voice-based marketing automation (VBMA) technologies can provide the ability to track where all phone leads originate as well as scoring and routing those calls.
Call Tracking
Call tracking lets you attribute all phone leads received by your client back to the campaigns you are running for them. This ensures that you get credited for every lead you generate, no matter what source it comes from.
By inserting unique numbers in your marketing you can easily determine the success of every campaign from billboards to emails. With keyword level call tracking you can run large PPC campaigns using a vast number of keywords, and dynamic number insertion guarantees that unique phone numbers show up on your clients’ webpages for each keyword.
Lead Scoring
When your client’s phone rings, they don’t want to spend their time talking with prospects that aren’t ready to talk to them. Without qualifying inbound leads, there is no way to know which leads are sales-ready and which are not.
With a hosted IVR (interactive voice response), it is easy to score and qualify inbound calls before they ever reach your clients. Anybody who is not ready to talk to sales can be routed to a lead capture survey to be scored and then placed into the appropriate bucket based on their readiness to buy.
Phone Routing
Being able to route the right leads to the right person can save your clients a lot of time and energy. If calls aren’t being routed efficiently, then this can consume a lot of your representatives’ precious time. With intelligent call routing you can make sure that every call is getting to the correct sales agent, support agent, store, or voicemail box. You can route a call based on many different factors such as the calls marketing source, location, score, or which agent is best able to handle that call.
Putting It All Together
Phone calls are coming in at unprecedented rates and as a marketing agency, it is more important then ever to be able to track them for your clients. This allows you to attribute each lead back to your marketing campaigns, even if that lead goes offline. Tracking and then scoring all inbound phone leads give you the ability to route each call to the representative best suited to handle that call. The addition of voice-based marketing automation technology to your existing arsenal of web tools ensures that you capture every phone lead and optimize the ROI you create for your clients by scoring and routing calls.
DialogTech’s voice-based marketing automation solution gives marketing agencies the power to track and automate inbound phone leads through every step of the process. To learn more about how your agency could be getting more out of your marketing efforts, take a look at our on-demand webinar: The Marketer’s Guide to Tracking and Scoring Phone Leads.
