We’ve all heard the saying, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.” But as a small business, what if you always knew which advertising and marketing campaigns were successful – and which ones weren’t generating results?
To achieve success in the current climate, small businesses need to scrutinize every aspect of their budgets – especially high-risk spending like marketing. This is where Call Tracking comes in.
This article details how Call Tracking by CallRail helps small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) ensure their marketing is working — sort of like an insurance policy for your marketing spend. In this article, we detail key Call Tracking features that can help you maximize your return on investment (ROI), along with insights into how your company can use Call Tracking to drive more, better business.
Call Tracking defined
What is call tracking? Call tracking is the process of determining how callers found your business – without asking, “How did you find us?”. Marketing and sales teams can use call tracking software to attribute phone calls to the specific marketing channels – both online and offline – that led callers to ring your business.
By knowing what makes your phone ring, you can measure the success of advertising campaigns and optimize future marketing strategy.
Call Tracking benefits
How exactly does Call Tracking work? These five Call Tracking benefits – and the features that enable them – make it an asset for small businesses that want to understand which marketing campaigns to double down on and where to pivot.
Benefit 1: Attribute calls to the campaigns that drove them
In the past, traditional marketing campaigns – like out-of-home billboard displays, flyers, and TV and radio were difficult to measure in terms of ROI. With call tracking, you know exactly how many leads and which ones come from each of these sources and more by using unique phone numbers for each respective campaign. With this information, you can decide whether your billboards are better placed in certain areas of town – or whether you should drop them altogether in favor of increased direct mail, transit advertising, or other channels.
For digital campaigns, Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) is a call tracking feature that assigns a unique phone number to each online source and then displays that phone number to visitors who arrive at your website via that specific source.
These sources include organic search, PPC ads, Yelp, or anywhere else your business has a presence online. The data then feeds to your Google Analytics account for you to review once your phone starts ringing. This allows you to pinpoint the exact source of incoming calls. When you know which campaigns are driving prospects to your small business, you can iterate and optimize for better results — and pivot efforts away from less successful campaigns.
Benefit #2 Connect with every prospect and customer
With Call Tracking by CallRail, you’ll never miss an opportunity as you can talk, text, and track all customer interactions from your Call Tracking dashboard. Call tracking by CallRail lets you record all of your calls (in a HIPAA-compliant manner for healthcare practices), enabling you to coach staff effectively.
For businesses running multiple campaigns simultaneously, whisper messages come in handy. They offer quick insights like “Orange Drive flier” – whispered directly into an agent's ear as they answer a call. This instantly clues reps in as to how a caller found your business. With whisper messages, agents know why the prospect or customer is calling and how to help — so they’re up to speed before they even say “hello”.
With Call Tracking, you can also set up email, browser, and/or push notifications for key events like first time callers, missed calls, voicemails, and qualified leads that ensure your team has a bird’s eye view of business as it unfolds. These are just a few Call Tracking features CallRail offers that ensure your team can connect with every single caller and increase the likelihood that they convert into paying customers.
Benefit #3 Tag, qualify, and prioritize leads automatically
Powering up Call Tracking with Conversation Intelligence by CallRail means your calls are automatically transcribed and analyzed – yielding valuable insights for your small business. For instance, if a real estate prospect mentions the terms “schedule a viewing,” the caller will be qualified as an urgent priority. Conversely, if a caller mentions “more information”, they will be prioritized lower than your hottest leads.
Conversation Intelligence lets you do away with manually reviewing call transcripts and qualifying leads and let automation take care of this on your behalf. Free up your agents to focus on more high-value activities, like closing your most motivated callers.
Benefit #4 Understand a lead’s journey before the call
Most callers interact with your business several times before they pick up the phone. Visitor-level tracking, a Call Tracking feature, assigns each of your website visitors a unique phone number, which follows them as they browse your website. When they decide to pick up the phone, you’ll know who they are, which pages they’ve visited and/or downloaded, and the search terms they used to find your business.
Connect instantly with callers and don’t waste time asking how they found your financial services firm, for example. Instead, dive right in to solving your callers’ challenges and fostering a customer experience that converts interested callers into paying customers.
Benefit #5 Report on call metrics and team performance
Small businesses cannot afford to waste budget on expensive, low-performing campaigns – especially in the current business environment. With Call Tracking, you can pinpoint the exact ROI of each of your campaigns, home your small business’s best strategies, and ditch those that generate disappointing results.
Call Tracking’s operational reporting, like the Calls by Day and Time report, helps boost productivity by showing when your business receives the most calls. Use these insights to ensure there are always enough people in the office during these hours. You can even access this information on the go thanks to the CallRail mobile app. Through CallRail’s robust reporting, your organization will answer more calls, avoid missed opportunities, and convert more prospects.
Convert callers into customers with CallRail
Getting prospects to call your small business is only the first step. From the moment they pick up the phone, serve them effectively by pinpointing what they need and how your small business can help.
Call Tracking helps small businesses increase the volume and quality of calls they receive by focusing their attention on the strategies and tactics that yield a high return on investment and optimized customer service.
Try Call Tracking today to boost your marketing performance in 2023 and beyond.
