With everything seemingly moving online it is easy to forget that there are still some offline business services and tools that can be of huge benefit to your company. One of them is the telephone, and no doubt there are many people reading this for whom speaking on the phone is still the number one way that you close deals and makes sales.
As with everything, modern technology can enhance how you use the telephone and make it more effective, and along with using chatbots, one of the most popular amongst business owners is ‘call tracking software’.
This enables you to track telephone calls and has other features such as recording calls, and most importantly for your marketing, that can help you monitor and assess which campaigns are working with regards to generating calls and which are not.
You can track calls from multiple sources which include your pay per click ads, social media, your website, and offline advertising such as newspapers, magazines, and even radio ads.
To give you a better understanding of call tracking, we are going outline some of the main features it has and give you more details on how they can benefit your business.
Dynamic Number Selection
Quite simply this means having an individual number for each of your marketing campaigns. This allows you track the calls coming into each of the numbers and thus you can see which campaign is generating the highest number of calls. It will also let you assess the quality of lead that each campaign is producing too.
This should enable to massively increase your return on investment for any of the marketing campaigns you are running as you can either switch off the campaigns that are not working, or at least seek to improve them by changing their ad copy for, example.
As it is also showing what the winning campaigns are, then you can increase your budget for them with a view to seeing an even greater number of calls, coming into your business.
Call Recording
This offers many more advantages than it might first appear to. Obviously, there is the practical aspect where you can check back on your calls in case you need to confirm some information, or what you discussed with a particular prospect or client.
In addition, call recording can also be used as a training tool, especially if you have staff who are responsible for answering calls, and in particular, where those calls are sales or customer service calls. You can listen to hear where staff might be going wrong, and obviously where they are doing well too.
Thereafter, you can set up training sessions, either individually, or as a group, where you can use the recordings to highlight where improvements can be made, and best practices.
The call recordings are also a great way to get feedback from customers who might highlight something they would like to see on your website or talk about a product or service that they would like, but which you currently do not offer. What better way to guarantee sales than to offer something which you already know people are looking for?
Multi-Channel Attribution
This allows you to have deep dive into your marketing and sales funnels to see what it is that is triggering people to call your business. Using multi-channel attribution, you will be able to better understand how your prospects are navigating your online properties, especially your website.
You also will have a clearer view of what actions they are taking just before they called and the reasons for it, such as them requesting more product information or wanting a quote.
Integration
Most reputable call tracking software will allow you to integrate with other programs and apps that you might be using within your business. A prime example is pay per click advertising such as Google Ads where the call to action will be to call the number in the ad.
Analytical platforms such as Google Analytics is another example and you should also be looking for call tracking software which can integrate with social media platforms, and e-commerce sites if these are part of your business model.
Lead Management
While you may already have your own lead management system in place, the lead management options within your call tracker software should not be overlooked.
Some of the specific features will enable you to easily search for and then filter leads by their name, their email or their telephone number, and could also include the area code if you are calling back a number of prospects within a specific town or city.
You could also filter them by the products or services they have previously purchased, making any future marketing campaigns more effective when you are outbound calling them.
Other lead management functions will be to eliminate junk leads, and the ability to export your leads to a spreadsheet or other CRM tool.