As your marketing agency begins to grow into a mid-sized firm and beyond, one of the most critical issues you’ll face is ensuring that your teams and clients have the tools they need to scale and improve their performance along with your business.
Bonfire is a full-service digital marketing agency based out of Perth, Australia, that specializes in SEO and paid search. For them, the search for better marketing tools isn’t just an abstraction. Throughout the more than two decades they’ve been in business, this quest has become central to their mission.
“We have a range of different clients, most of which are small-to-medium-sized businesses, but then we also have some of Australia’s largest brands on board with us,” says George Gavalas, head of digital marketing at Bonfire.
“We’ve been doing this for a while — we like to think we’re one of the best in Australia,” he laughs. “But we also have the track record to prove it.”
As they tout on their website’s ‘About’ page: “We’ve been dominating digital since 2 B.G. (That’s Before Google.)”
For Bonfire, their adoption of CallRail has been a valuable addition to their marketing stack that has helped them continue to deliver great results for their clients. In one case, call tracking helped a client cut their missed call rate by an impressive two-thirds.
Easy Setup and Scalability Makes All the Difference
“In the past, call tracking was one of those things that we always knew would be a great help to us, but it was just too expensive or complicated to implement,” Gavalas explains. But after learning that CallRail has a native integration with their other systems, Bonfire knew that they couldn’t wait any longer.
“So I tested [CallRail] with a client, and then talked it over with him,” he says. “Because his site was on WordPress, it was so simple to setup — we downloaded a plugin, activated it, and it started swapping in our tracking numbers. With other call tracking solutions we’ve used in the past, it used to be a nightmare to swap numbers in and out like this.”
Another function that has been a real boon for Bonfire and their clients is CallRail’s call recording features. By having their calls recorded and available at their fingertips for instant review, Bonfire’s clients were able to better train their sales and customer support staff, and streamline their operations to increase their overall efficiency.
“Many of our clients use [call recording] for both sales and customer service, with managers listening to recorded calls to measure how their agents are performing,” Gavalas says. “This is a particularly useful feature, because it helps them identify where their staff are performing well, and where they aren’t, which helps a lot with training.”
He continues: “And a big part of that was the alerts feature in CallRail — as soon as the call was completed, they received an email where they could just click a link and then listen to the call recording. Not only did this save them dozens of work hours each week, they also had a fast and direct way to review the performance of their front desk, or their sales team.”
And thanks to CallRail’s fair and transparent pricing structure, Bonfire and their clients can be fully confident that they’re getting a great deal for their investment. “Your pricing plans are another area where CallRail really hits the nail on the head,” Gavalas says. “Not just for being affordable, but also with clarity on how costs will scale up with usage.”
Comprehensive Call Analytics: The Key to Agency Success
But features and ease-of-use are only one half of this equation — any digital marketing agency worth their salt also needs to be able to deliver results for their client, while also showing how their work contributed to a boost in ROI.
For the Bonfire team, CallRail has taken the guesswork out of the otherwise difficult task of tracking calls that originate from online and non-mobile channels. Thanks to CallRail, they can rest assured that they’re getting detailed attribution for their calls, no matter where they’re coming from.
Data like this can make a huge difference for marketers, in ways both big and small. With the ability to filter their CallRail reporting by first-time callers, Bonfire is able to provide meaningful guidance to their clients.
“One client thought they were getting a lot of repeat phone calls,” Gavalas says. “But we could point to CallRail’s reporting and show that, actually, the majority of their calls were first-time callers, which helped them plan their next campaign.”
Another data point Bonfire and their clients lean on heavily is missed calls. Oftentimes, Bonfire will find their clients have no idea that missed calls are even happening in the first place, since they’re not being tracked. (This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this from a CallRail customer, either.) By tracking all of their missed calls and sending out prompt alerts by email or text, they can be sure they never miss the chance to earn a new lead or complete a conversion.
And sometimes, even secondary data points like missed calls can spur some big results, as Bonfire saw firsthand: “One client was missing around one-third of their calls, but with CallRail’s reporting, we got that down to 10 percent, which is the average for all of our clients,” Gavalas says.
Bonfire has also started putting CallRail’s new Conversation Intelligence features through their paces, and they’re impressed with what they’ve seen so far. Gavalas and his team are especially excited about how CallScore and Automation Rules can potentially save a great deal of time.
“With CallScore, we can specify certain terms and keywords that we want to listen for,” he explains. “Then, we can take a look back at all of our calls and show that a specific term is being mentioned X number of times out of Y number of calls, and how many of those calls result in a new lead or conversion, and so on.”
Indeed, between CallRail’s advanced feature set and native integration with their other tools, Bonfire can produce robust marketing campaigns and comprehensive reporting that has a real impact on their clients’ bottom lines.
“This gives us hard data that we can bring to our client and show them how our work is impacting their ROI,” Gavalas says. “With call tracking, it’s one more way to demonstrate our value and the work we do.”
Bonfire is a CallRail Platinum Agency Partner. Agencies that join the Partner Program are eligible for co-marketing benefits like this, along with webinars and guest posts. Interested in joining the Partner Program? Sign up here.
