It’s a situation marketers find themselves in all too often.
You’ve tried every possible tactic, added a ton of new sales and marketing channels, and optimized the sales cycle. Yet, nothing has changed. Your results are still stagnant, and you feel stuck.
Believe it or not, the answer isn’t to add another trendy marketing tactic or develop a full-fledged campaign. You need to do a better job of tracking your metrics and key performance indicators.
Your sales and marketing data is the map to business growth. If you’re not following it, you’ll never reach the gold.
But here’s the catch — platforms like Google Analytics only highlight online activity, right? What about all the calls your company receives? The in-store visits and phone call follow-ups from your sales team? How are those being recorded?
Since monitoring metrics and responding appropriately is the key to business growth, marketers need a tool to bridge the gap between online and offline interactions.
Enter: Call tracking.
Call Tracking 101
Call tracking is the process of using a designated toll-free or vanity number to identify where and how the caller found your business.
For example, let’s imagine your business ran a billboard campaign with a specific toll-free number. This number is only used on this ad, nowhere else.
Every time you receive a call to that number, you know exactly how the caller found out about your business. There’s no guessing which marketing campaign or channel generated the call.
Call Tracking Features
There’s more to call tracking than counting the number of calls that come in from a particular source. Vanity numbers and toll-free numbers also come with call tracking capabilities such as:
- Call Recording: Record phone calls from prime callers. Use the recordings to listen back for vital customer information that can aid in the sales process. Or, many businesses opt to use call recordings as part of an overall training program for new employees.
- Call Forwarding: A common misconception about 800 numbers with call tracking is that you need a fancy switchboard or a call center. Not at all! Calls from your toll-free number can be forwarded directly to your cell phone, so you never miss a lead.
- Call Notes: Call tracking software allows sales teams to take detailed call notes and add them to the database. Sales and customer service teams can then review the messages for future calls or customer interactions.
- Call Notifications: Your teams will receive a detailed email notification for every call that comes their way.
When paired with a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, call tracking and call intelligence features are unstoppable!
6 Core Benefits of Call Tracking
Numerous businesses use call tracking to their advantage, from health care facilities to SaaS startups. These companies leverage the power of call tracking to gain insight into the status of their marketing plans, better understand consumer behavior and needs, and optimize customer service and sales processes.
Through the data gathered by call tracking technology, your business can:
- Identify top and under-performing marketing and sales campaigns.
Assign a dedicated call tracking number to each new campaign you launch. As the campaign goes on, you’ll be able to see how many actual leads it generates by pairing the online results with the number of calls you receive to that specific number. Using this information, you can make strategic decisions about the direction of the campaign. - Determine which sales channels generate the most leads and conversions.
Instead of guessing which marketing and sales channels drive the most leads to your business, you’ll already have the answer. - Monitor call volumes across multiple locations.
Call volumes are indicative of a few things. Either your marketing efforts are generating a wealth of leads, or your customers have problems they need to solve. Keep an eye on call volume levels and details in the call notes to determine the root of the volume increase. - Discover new customer needs, opportunities, and problems.
Call recordings and notes for call tracking numbers provide marketers with qualitative data that no reporting software could ever provide. Use this contextual information to discover what your customers need, want, and have trouble with. You may just discover a new and lucrative business opportunity in the process! - Track the effectiveness of new company programs and strategies.
Did you launch a new product or service? Attach a vanity or toll-free number to the marketing efforts for this new offering and track the results. Are customers satisfied? Do they need more help than not? You wouldn’t be able to track this through an analytics program! - Quantify ROI of various offline and online marketing and sales efforts.
Pair the value of offline phone leads and conversions with your online marketing results to truly understand your marketing department’s overall return on investment.
And that’s just scratching the surface! Call tracing provides companies with a myriad of benefits — but only if you track the right metrics along the way.
7 Call Tracking Metrics to Help Grow Your Business
Once you’ve got your call tracking numbers in place and ready to rock, keep an eye on these metrics to monitor business growth.
- Call Volume
Call tracking numbers help marketers attribute offline leads to specific ad campaigns and strategies. Call volume metrics provide marketers with insight into call trends and sources. For example, without tracking call volume, you might not know that your social media ad campaign is generating ten more calls per day than any other strategy. Additionally, call volume helps businesses understand call patterns per location. One of your stores may be inundated with calls daily, while the different location only hears crickets. You’d never know this without call volume metrics! - Call Duration
Are your customers calling for a quick answer, or do they need to be walked through a detailed purchase process over the phone?
Call duration metrics enlighten marketers to the reality of their sales cycle.
Are you receiving a ton of short calls? If so, your marketing campaigns may be missing a few important details. On the other hand, if your customers ask several questions and stay on the line longer, perhaps you need to rethink your content marketing and overall brand education strategy.
Keep an eye on call duration times to monitor marketing efforts and customer service patterns. Do your employees do a good job of answering questions, or are they stuck on the line while searching for the right response?
- Hold Times
Along the call volume and duration lines, it’s important to review how long leads and customers are left on hold.
If the hold time is extensive, but your call volume is low, and duration is high, this may mean that the customer service team needs to be trained to optimize call times. While sitting and chatting with a customer builds a relationship, it may be detrimental to those waiting on hold.
On the other side of the spectrum, if your company experiences high hold times and a skyrocketing call volume, this can signal an operational issue. (Or, a high-performing marketing campaign!)
When hold times become out of control, look at the call tracking numbers generating the calls. This will provide more insight into the issue at hand.
- Call Location
Marketers need all the data they can get their hands on. This data informs future campaign decisions, such as which demographic to target.
When a lead calls your company, you’ll have information such as which phone number they rang as well as where the call came in from.
Use this metric to monitor the location of your target audience. Are new markets emerging? Is a once-active market suddenly dropping in call volume? You’ll have to track the call location to find these answers!
- First-Time Caller Counts
You’ll also be able to see if a lead is a first-time or return caller.
While you want a healthy mix of both, be sure to keep a steady count of how many first-time callers are generated after new campaign launches.
- Calls Generated Per Channel
Remember, you can assign specific call tracking numbers to your sales channels. Monitor the number of calls generated per channel.
Some channels may do well in generating online leads, while others work to produce offline calls. But, without tracking the number of calls generated, these channels may appear to be under-performing.
- Call Conversion Rates
It’s one thing to track the number of calls your team receives and which marketing effort drove the call. But are those calls turning into paying customers?
Make sure your customer relationship management database is up to date and keep an eye on the conversion rate of your calls.
If the conversion rate is low, consider implementing more sales training or looking for ways to improve the audience targeting of your marketing campaign.
Call Tracking Metrics and Business Growth Go Hand in Hand
Monitoring call tracking metrics such as call conversion rates, volume, and origin can be the difference between a successful growth strategy and a stagnant one.
Claim your toll-free number and get started with call tracking today.
