Call Tracking Benefits: Boost Your Business Success & ROI
Cecily Giancaterino
Apr 09, 2024
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15 min read
Calling
In today’s digital-first world, you may think consumers only want to inquire about products and services online. But many people still prefer the traditional way of calling a company on the phone instead of entering their personal information on an online contact form or chatting with a bot on a company’s website. In fact, a recent study found that 60% of consumers prefer to call small businesses on the phone instead of reaching out digitally. If you’re looking to amplify your digital marketing performance and drive sales, call tracking can take you to those new heights. Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of call tracking and how to optimize your call tracking strategy with software.
Key Takeaways:
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Call tracking is a powerful tool: Call tracking allows businesses to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, gather customer insights, and improve overall performance. It provides valuable data on lead sources, customer behavior, and campaign attribution.
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Optimize marketing campaigns: With call tracking, businesses can attribute phone calls to specific marketing channels, keywords, or ads. This data helps allocate marketing budget effectively and optimize campaigns for better conversion rates.
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Understand customer behavior: Call tracking provides insights into customer preferences, pain points, and trends. This knowledge enables businesses to refine marketing messages, target the right audience, and improve campaign performance.
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Improve customer service and sales: Call tracking helps businesses monitor and evaluate customer interactions through call recording and monitoring. It enables personalized customer experiences and empowers sales teams to nurture leads effectively.
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Maximize return on investment (ROI): By identifying high-performing campaigns and optimizing marketing spend, call tracking helps businesses increase their ROI. It allows for data-driven decision making, reducing expenses and improving sales conversion rates.
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Enhance sales techniques: Analyzing call data and customer insights helps businesses refine sales techniques, address customer needs, and provide relevant information. This leads to improved sales performance and increased revenue.
What is Call Tracking?
Call tracking is a reporting and call recording feature that allows businesses to track all the essential details of inbound calls. These details include who called, when they called, why they called, and what search engine they found the business phone number on.
The main purpose of call tracking is to uncover which marketing activities generate the most calls and spark the highest amount of interest among potential customers. These insights can help you assess which marketing strategies are working most effectively, so you can optimize your marketing budget.
Local & Toll-Free Tracking Numbers
You should use a local call tracking number when you’re looking to attract local customers, since many consumers prefer to shop in their local community. When they see a phone number with a familiar area code, you’ll have an edge over the competition because they're more likely to answer. Conversely, calling from an out-of-town area code is more likely to scare the customer off and cause them to ignore your call.
If you’re looking to showcase a national or global presence for your business, toll-free call tracking numbers are for you. They also have the benefit of giving your international customers a chance to call your business without paying a toll, which can turn some potential customers off.
What is Call Tracking Software?
Call tracking software collects important data from phone conversations and assigns dynamic numbers to a business’s online and offline sales and marketing strategies. Marketers use this call tracking data to determine exactly what marketing campaign or lead generation strategy prompted the customer to make the phone call.
Call tracking software can work seamlessly with existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems. As you use the software to track your campaign performance, you can leverage the metrics to modify and enhance customer experience and satisfaction. This helps you create a customer journey that aligns perfectly with the wants and needs of consumers.
Some of the most important features included in call tracking services include:
- Call recording. Never miss a beat with automated call recording. This feature ensures you accurately heard the customer's questions or complaints and allows you to serve them to the best of your ability. Recordings and transcriptions of your calls are also a powerful training tool. You can use them with your sales team to improve their performance and provide valuable feedback.
- Real-time notifications. You'll receive an email or text message alert the second a call comes in. This allows you to either answer or listen to the call recording and follow up immediately. This kind of real-world notification keeps you constantly dialed in to what consumers are looking for so you can provide it.
- Integrations. You can integrate your call tracking data with other digital tools, like Google Analytics or Google Ads. This lets you manage your conversions in one streamlined place.
How Does Call Tracking Software Work?
Software for call tracking works via dynamic number insertion. That's the process of assigning a unique phone number to each ad source so you can keep track of the following:
- The origins of the calls
- The number that was called
- The geographical location of the caller and other demographics
- Phone call recording
- Marketing medium
- How landing pages on your website are performing and which ones are generating the most calls
- Search engine they found you on
- Ad service used (for example, Google ads or Facebook ads)
- Device type
The dynamic numbers immediately tell you which campaign the caller is responding to based on the phone number they’re calling. Then, the software tracks the following metrics of each campaign:
- Responses
- Interaction
- Engagement
Tracking these metrics lets you know how your ad campaign is performing.
Benefits of Call Tracking Software
Call tracking solutions come with a bevy of benefits, such as:
Marketing ROI in-depth analysis
Call tracking is the best way to get visibility into your marketing return on investment (ROI). By using a call tracking system, you'll know which advertising strategies improve conversion rates and send good leads to your business. You can also see which ones are underperforming. If you use Google Ads to run ads, call tracking will reveal leads and sales down to the keyword a user clicked before navigating to your website. This lets you spend more of your budget on the keywords, strategies, and channels that convert and provide the best ROI. It also limits your risk of wasting your budget on things that aren't working.
Improves lead generation
The phone tracking system lets you identify the exact source of every inbound call, whether it was a website, social media platform, or billboard ad campaign. It turns out that phone calls are still excellent lead magnets, with 65% of Fortune 500 company CEOs saying they believe phone calls are their highest quality lead source.
Call tracking lets you attribute your leads to their sources. This gives you a chance to align your marketing efforts and accurately capture and close the lead.
Optimizes paid search
All marketers know the importance of getting the most out of their paid campaigns. After all, they take up significant portions of the budget, so getting the most bang for your buck is key. Phone tracking software helps you:
- Convert leads into sales
- Retarget prospective customers
- Determine the exact keyword that prompted the consumer to call your business.
This data allows you to optimize your paid search campaigns and buy ads based on real-time marketing metrics, not guesses or gut feelings.
Better understand the customer journey
Gaining insight into the customer journey is critically important for online marketing campaigns. Call tracking software lets you gain a deeper understanding of how consumers are moving through the sales funnel. This provides a full picture of the customer journey rather than a fragmented mosaic that leads you to make uninformed and inaccurate decisions.
Today’s customer journey merges online and offline experiences. When you use call tracking software, you can get a 360-degree view of both the online and offline customer journey. You can also learn how someone went from seeing something they liked on your website to calling your phone number and making a purchase. This is the only way to get a true omnichannel view of your marketing campaigns. It's an important first step in optimizing your marketing strategy, so it aligns with the wants and needs of consumers.
Advanced and improved calling experience
Providing an advanced, helpful customer call experience requires your sales team to have all the relevant details. By integrating the call tracking feature with your CRM software, you can instantly access the required information about the caller including details such as:
- Their location
- A history of previous interactions
- Call history
- Product they're interested in
- Social media engagement
- Website usage
You can use these details to improve caller experience by reducing the time it takes to learn the above information. What's more, customers don't need to repeat themselves every time they call you.
No more unanswered calls
When consumers take the time to call a business, they don’t want to make multiple calls to get their questions answered. They want answers right away. In fact, 75 percent of consumers surveyed said they're highly annoyed when they can’t get a live person on the phone at a business. Call tracking software can make sure you don’t lose out on sales because nobody was available to answer the phone. Call tracking services will send you a real-time notification for every call you missed. This allows you to take the appropriate steps and follow up immediately while the qualified lead is still warm. Being able to call the customer back immediately will improve your sales, customer relationships, and reputation.
What’s more, the analytics your call tracking provider reveals will show peak hours and days that customers tend to call your business. This helps you ensure adequate staff coverage during those times to catch all incoming calls.
Intelligently route calls
Another way to quickly turn an eager customer into an annoyed one is by placing them on a long hold or sending them from person to person who can’t answer their questions. Call tracking solves this problem by routing calls based on caller segmentation. It works to pre-qualify the customer and their intent through a number of defined factors. These factors then automatically route them to the right member of the sales team.
Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your team
The benefits of call tracking software stretch beyond your profit and customers. It can help you manage your call center team by keeping tabs on employee performance to gauge how well they’re doing their jobs. You can then use those insights to change employee responsibilities and roles.
Keep track of offline engagements
Call-tracking software can help you keep track of all successful offline marketing channels. When you get a call, you'll know how the caller found you due to the associated number instead of asking them. This way, you can also quantify how well or poorly your offline engagements are performing.
These offline engagements could be advertisements on TV or radio or in newspapers. They could also be trade shows and industry event participation. You can monitor even the tiniest marketing efforts by assigning specific numbers to these strategies. Then, use the call tracking features to keep an eye on them.
Conversion through smartphone usage
The way we use our mobile phones has truly changed customer buying behaviors. Call tracking facilities have made it much easier to track phone calls made in response to online advertisements. This allows you to understand the correlation between the two. It's also a great way to get valuable insights into how your marketing channels are interdependent and interconnected. We all know businesses can’t rely on one marketing stream. Thus, using a mix of two or more can be highly beneficial.
Knowing exactly how well your marketing efforts are doing — no matter how big or small — helps you make more informed and effective strategic investments. This allows you to ensure your efforts give back. Call tracking is a simple, effective way to make sure you're overseeing all your best ROI marketing avenues and keeping track of callers in a way that leads to high satisfaction and conversion rates.
Gain valuable insights
Sales tracking lets your sales team gain valuable insights about qualified leads. You can then follow up with the most up-to-date, accurate information about their pain points and what they want to accomplish by working with you. Call tracking software lets you record all incoming calls. It will even provide you with a transcription. These features let you listen to your calls and take notes on the valuable information the customer provided. This means you can get a briefing on each call without worrying about miscommunications that lead to sales falling through.
Other insights that a good call tracking system provides include:
- Hold time
- Call duration
- Conversion rates
- Other attributes related to leads
This information gives you more insight into your customers’ thought processes. It also lets you make informed decisions that will improve their experience.
Prove your value
Proving your value to your customers is critically important to ensure a lasting and loyal relationship. Call tracking can help you prove the impact of your work by providing data and a concrete way to show your clients how you’re contributing toward their business. This lets you receive well-deserved credit for leads and revenue your clients generate from the callers you bring them.
FiveCRM Can Help
Choose FIVE CRM’s telephone integration features with superior tracking abilities if you, too, want to benefit from the power of call tracking. Get in touch with us to know more.
Are you looking for a scalable and affordable customer relationship management system for your business? Book your free Discovery Call with FiveCRM today!
FAQs
Q: What is call tracking and how does it benefit businesses?
A: Call tracking is a method of tracking and analyzing phone calls to measure marketing campaign effectiveness, gather customer insights, and improve overall business performance. It benefits businesses by providing valuable data on lead sources, customer behavior, and campaign attribution, which helps optimize marketing strategies, increase conversion rates, and maximize return on investment (ROI).
Q: How does call tracking help businesses improve their marketing campaigns?
A: Call tracking offers several benefits for improving marketing campaigns:
- Attribution: It provides insights into which marketing channels, keywords, or ads drive phone calls, enabling businesses to allocate their marketing budget more effectively.
- Conversion Optimization: By analyzing call data, businesses can identify trends, customer preferences, and pain points, allowing them to optimize their campaigns to generate more qualified leads and increase conversions.
- Campaign Testing: Call tracking allows businesses to conduct A/B testing on different marketing campaigns to determine which strategies deliver the best results in terms of generating phone call leads.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: With access to call analytics and customer behavior, businesses can make data-driven decisions to refine their marketing messages, target the right audience, and improve campaign performance.
Q: Can call tracking help businesses improve customer service and sales?
A: Absolutely. Call tracking can enhance customer service and sales by:
- Call Recording and Monitoring: It allows businesses to listen to recorded calls and evaluate customer interactions for quality assurance purposes, identify training needs, and improve sales techniques.
- Personalized Customer Experience: By tracking caller information and call history, businesses can provide personalized experiences, addressing customers by name and tailoring their interactions based on past conversations.
- Lead Nurturing: Call tracking data provides valuable insights into customer needs and pain points, enabling businesses to tailor their sales approach and provide relevant information to nurture leads more effectively.
Q: What impact can call tracking have on a business's ROI?
A: Call tracking can have a significant impact on a business's ROI by:
- Identifying High-Performing Campaigns: It helps businesses identify marketing campaigns that generate the most phone call leads and conversions, allowing them to allocate their resources to campaigns that deliver the highest return.
- Cost Optimization: By understanding which marketing channels or campaigns generate low-quality leads or have a high cost per acquisition, businesses can optimize their budget allocation and reduce marketing expenses while maximizing results.
- Sales Optimization: By analyzing call data and improving sales techniques based on customer insights, businesses can increase their sales conversion rates, ultimately boosting their overall ROI.
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