You’ve spent thousands of dollars on message development and media placement. Your marketing campaign’s call to action is to call. Now your sales team and call center are waiting for the phones to ring. And they had better, or your return on investment will be the same as if you’d spent the cash on gold-plated fixtures for the executive washrooms.
So how do you make sure your team gets those serious inbound phone calls and maintains the high conversion rates that will translate to campaign success? Here are a few tips.
Mix Offers
What do you want respondents to do? That decision should be the starting point for the development of every call marketing campaign. What do they get if they pick up the phone and dial your number? What’s the incentive? Maybe they get the initial order at a steep discount, or the first month’s service free. You can trial several offers and see which approach delivers serious prospects, ripe for conversion.
The secret is state-of-the-art call tracking so that you have the metrics, in real-time, that will tell you which offers work, and which don’t.
Use Dynamic Number Insertion
DNI is a technology based on assigning separate phone numbers to different campaign elements based on factors to be tested, such as the creative, the media used, or the offer. With the metrics captured, you can switch strategies to gain the maximum ROI of your advertising dollars. Use the approach that delivers results, and dump or revise the approaches that don’t entice serious callers.
Listen to Your Respondents
Advertisers can make the mistake of figuring that inbound callers have all called for one reason: to purchase the product or service for which they called. With that faulty reasoning, advertisers might rely on their internal salespeople or call center agents to go through their spiel, get the order and get to the next call.
If their close rates are low, you figure that’s the fault of the agent on the line. But you might find a whole lot more valuable information if your team listens to those inbound calls—even when no sale is made.
Are you losing the callers because the offering is not what they’re expecting based on their understanding of your marketing materials? Is the cost higher than expected? Are callers confused at what you’re trying to sell them, or is the CTA offer insufficient to spur action? The point is, even a missed sales call can be a learning experience. If you can detect strong trends in the cause of lost sales, you might be able to adjust campaign messaging to generate a more serious response.
Track in Real-Time
The last thing you want to do is review results when your campaign is over. When the budget is gone there’s little you can do except mourn for those lost opportunities and hope you can do better next campaign.
Today’s technology enables advertisers to track results in real-time, enabling you to tweak or altogether overhaul messaging, media, or other campaign factors to increase call rates and optimize campaign ROI.
Use Engaging Vanity Phone Numbers to Trigger Response
The reason advertisers use vanity phone numbers in the first place is for memorability. Few respondents have the opportunity to pick up the phone as soon as they hear, see or read your ad. And they’re not going to remember your business’s phone number for long–unless it’s memorable. They’ll long remember advertisers with response numbers such as 1-800-FLOWERS, 800-GO-FEDEX, or 800-CONTACTS.
Memorability is especially important when your campaign success is measured by inbound calls. If you can reduce your CTA to little more than a memorable phone number, you’ve made it as simple as possible for your target audience to respond. Consider trialing multiple vanity 800 phone numbers to test response rate as well as the quality of responses.
At 800.com, we help businesses find toll-free vanity phone numbers that are on message, engage customers and get phones to ring. Call 800.com at (210) 800-0000 or visit our website to obtain vanity toll-free phone numbers that will enhance your company’s next call marketing campaign.
