Since August, we’ve been partnering with leaders in the digital marketing world to offer free webinars to our audiences as part of our Master Your Marketing series. In this series, marketing professionals are bringing insider tricks, stories and case studies designed to help you master different aspects of digital marketing and advertising.
Our third webinar in the series was held on Thursday, October 26 and was presented by Convirza’s David Danielson. For all those who missed it, we’re giving you a recap below. In this month’s presentation, Convirza’s David Danielson provides insights into using phone call analytics to increase marketing ROI.
Here’s a full recap of his webinar…
We Now Live in a Data-Driven World
In the past, a lot of marketing relied on intuition or gut-feelings, particularly around ROI of a given campaign or outbound operation. Today, it’s possible to track all sorts of metrics and data points, giving marketers constant insights into the strengths and weakness of each aspect of their operations.
In general, engagement is becoming much more important in digital marketing. The focus should be placed on communicating with a potential user/customer/client through an actual conversation.
The Way Companies Are Thinking About Calls is Changing
In the past, calls have been a huge blind spot for companies. Obviously, calls are harder to track and their results harder to quantify when compared to emails or social media marketing, but the tools for tracking calls have really come into their own in the past few years.
With the rise of mobile, the volume of inbound calls to businesses has skyrocketed. There is now a direct line between using your phone to search for business information, seeing a clickable phone number and calling it.
What is Call Analytics and Is It Right for my Business?
There are a handful of industries that live and die by calls. These include advertising and marketing agencies, auto dealership & service businesses, call and contact centers, education, financial services, healthcare services, industrial equipment companies, home services and home improvement, real estate, hospitality and more.
These types of businesses rely on phones for nearly every aspect of their business, especially marketing. Call analytics is the ability to gather reliable data about your phone operation through digital analytics tools. In the past phone calls have been a catch-all for marketing and advertising activities and it was hard to know which aspect of an outbound operation actually prompted a potential customer to call. Call analytics aims to fill this gap in knowledge.
Call analytics might be right for your business if:
- Your product costs more than $200.
- You want to listen to and review your phone calls.
- You want to find which keywords are converting to appointments or sales.
- You want to improve online advertising attributions.
How Call Analytics Improves Marketing Campaigns
Call analytics gives an extra layer of insight into what’s working and what’s not. It allows marketers to get a much clearer picture of the often complex customer journeys on the road to a conversion.
Call analytics can be used to improve the strength of Google Adwords campaigns, SEO, social media campaigns, email marketing, and landing page optimization. Furthermore, call analytics can be used to improve traditional advertising channels like print, TV, radio, billboard, and outdoor marketing.
The Key to Call Analytics is Understanding DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion)
Simply put, DNI is the strategy of adding unique phone numbers throughout your customer-facing operations. This builds segmentation into your operation, allowing you to attribute calls to specific actions. DNI is one of the most overlooked tools in a digital marketer’s toolbox, mostly because it’s not widely understood. DNI helps marketers boost attribution on average by 33% by simply adding an extra bit of data on what prompted the phone call.
All call tracking companies offer DNI (or your web developer may be able to custom code this) via a small snippet of code on a webpage. The code and subsequent cookie tracks individual users’ interactions with your company’s web properties and has the ability to dynamically serve unique phone numbers.
These individualized phone numbers automatically served to unique customers adds the ability to gain more insight into their customer journey and enables Call Reporting. Call Reporting shows you exactly how many calls are coming in per marketing channel (AdWords vs. Facebook vs. email, etc). Once one is much better able to see patterns in the reporting, evaluating current operations and future planning becomes more data-driven.
Call Recording & Advanced Call Monitoring
Another great and often overlooked tool is Call Recording. Call Recording is exactly what it sounds like, recording the audio of calls with customers for later review. With Call Recording, managers are able to listen in and ensure calls are being properly handled, create materials for training or deduce strategies to improve overall effectiveness. Plus, Call Recording enables another valuable data point as you get a sense of how many calls are high quality vs. low quality.
Optimizing this process further is Convirza’s unique advanced call monitoring functionality. Their system automatically monitors calls for trigger words like ‘proposal’ or ‘sign up’, allowing you to automatically measure the quality of calls without the need for real-time, human review.
Conclusion
For many businesses, Call Analytics is an affordable and valuable way to understand and improve the effectiveness of all sorts of business functions. Call-driven businesses are now about to see what’s driving sales versus what’s just wasting budget. While phone calls were once outside the scope of data-driven businesses, digital technology has caught up thanks to services like Convirza.
