How Constellation Behavioral Health uses CallRail and Salesforce to solve the multi-touch attribution problem

CBH shows how CallRail’s Salesforce integration brings attribution clarity to a challenging market

Outpatient behavioral health treatment is a sensitive field in which patients seek help for mental health issues like addiction and families look for reassurance that their loved one is receiving the best possible care. In an industry like this, trust and accuracy are equally paramount.

It can also be a tough field for the communications specialists and marketers who connect patients and families with treatment centers. Mental health is a topic that demands respect and sensitivity, and admission to a facility is usually a lengthy process that requires many back-and-forth phone calls, along with extensive research and comparison-shopping on the client’s part.

Constellation Behavioral Health (CBH) is an organization managing several treatment facilities on the west coast of the United States. Based out of Mill Valley, California, CBH treats several thousand individuals and families each year for addiction, mental health, and other co-occurring disorders.

For the communications team at CBH, the complex and sensitive nature of admissions and treatment presents several unique problems that most marketers don’t have to deal with. Namely, the fact that prospects and patients will contact CBH through multiple channels, and often only commit to a treatment plan after extensive discussion.

“One of our big challenges is accuracy with this kind of multi-touch attribution,” explains Drew Paxton, chief strategy officer at CBH. “This treatment can be a very considered and expensive purchase, so sometimes people will search for a long while before making a call or a purchase. In cases like this, you can’t always track them back to the first campaign they found you through, so we might not even know whether they came in through paid search or organic search. “

“Typically, a client is researching multiple facilities at once, sometimes they’ll be in our pipeline for months at a time or longer before they make a decision,” Paxton adds. “It’s a long and complicated process, just like treatment and recovery, so attribution can be challenging.”

Call tracking and Salesforce: Better together

It took plenty of testing and experimenting, but CBH has learned that by integrating CallRail with their Salesforce CRM they’re able to drill down and identify solid attribution data that empowers their clients and strengthens their business.

As a CRM platform, Salesforce helps marketers track the performance of their campaigns, and manage and categorize the leads who come in from a given channel. In many ways this follows the same basic principles as call tracking — having accurate information about where your leads and customers are coming from helps you make better business decisions. With CallRail and Salesforce integrated and synchronized, CBH is able to match their caller attribution data against their campaign data, giving them a broader and more insightful picture of their communications and marketing efforts.

By tracking the total number of leads, inquiries and requests for treatment, CBH has direct metrics for how effective their incoming and outgoing calls are. And with the integration, they’re able to centralize this call data in Salesforce and cross-reference it against their marketing and communication campaigns, providing them with a detailed view of how individual initiatives are performing.

“[The CallRail-Salesforce integration] helps us target how we focus our campaigns and make sure we’re focusing on the right keywords and demographics,” says Ryan Horton, digital project manager at CBH. “If we find that a particular campaign is underperforming, we can either fine-tune the campaign itself or maybe divert funds from that campaign to one that’s working better. Having access to this granular data about campaign or ad performance, in real-time, is incredibly useful no matter what industry you’re working in, but especially for us.”

Better attribution, better outcomes

It’s a long road to perfect attribution when dealing with complex multi-touch marketing like this, but CBH is well on their way — they estimate they’ve been able to reach 70% attribution accuracy after integrating CallRail with Salesforce, and are confident that further fine-tuning their approach will push that number even higher.

“The Salesforce integration is incredibly useful to us when we have an admission because we’re able to see what channel they came in from, and in many cases the keyword or campaign level,” Horton says. “Analytics for phone calls by themselves are certainly useful, but having this Salesforce data integrated with our call data makes both even stronger, because now we’re able to see the full story that led to someone making a call, and eventually being admitted at one of our facilities.”

He continues: “A call by itself doesn’t always lead to an admission right away, but being able to see that call as part of a larger journey helps us make choices that are both good for the patients we serve and good for our business. This data helps us make sure we’re focusing on the channels and initiatives that produce the best possible results for all parties involved, especially our patients.”

Ready to see how call tracking can work alongside your CRM and help you achieve attribution clarity?