One of the best parts of writing case studies about CallRail users is that we get talk to so many different people.
We’ve interviewed digital marketing pros from Down Under, explored how call tracking helped a Gulf Coast nursing home connect families during a hurricane crisis, and seen how our service helped a California real estate firm bounce back from devastating losses during the 2008 housing collapse.
But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that there are plenty of CallRail power users right here in our hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. One such business is Cardinal Digital Marketing, whose office is just a short stroll up Peachtree Street from CallRail HQ.
Cardinal’s excellent work speaks for itself — they’ve been saluted by Google as the #1 SEO company in Atlanta, and in 2014 they placed on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. (Hey, that’s another thing we have in common!)
We recently caught up with Cardinal to discuss how one particular tool in their arsenal has empowered them to offer best-in-class service to their clients: Advanced call tracking and analytics, powered by CallRail.
A one-stop-shop marketing agency needs the best tools
As an agency, Cardinal takes a full-service approach to the services they offer clients. “We do pretty much ‘all of the above’ for our clients, whether that’s creating landing pages, managing paid media, or somewhere in between,” explains Holly Robowski, associate director of paid media at Cardinal. “We want our clients to know that once they sign with us, they have the peace of mind of knowing we’re taking care of their marketing needs.”
Many of Cardinal’s clients are concentrated in the healthcare industry, which relies heavily on phones for driving new leads, conversions, and repeat customers. In order to provide that peace of mind for their clients, advanced call tracking is an absolutely critical part of their marketing stack.
Cardinal had been experimenting with a different call tracking vendor for a few months, but they weren’t satisfied with what they were getting for their money. The platform put strict limits on how they could manage numbers and calls, and only offered barebones reporting. It also wasn’t very user-friendly, both from the agency side of things and for the individual clients who wanted to check their analytics.
After a fair bit of research, CallRail emerged as the clear winner among thanks to its powerful feature-set, ease-of-use, and transparent pricing system.
“What really made CallRail stand out to us was how the platform itself is extremely user-friendly for both our team to manage and for our clients,” Robowski says. “As an agency, features like this are incredibly important to us. They save us a lot of time managing accounts, and our clients always appreciate how the reporting is easy to access and understand.”
And it wasn’t long before they learned that CallRail could be a trusted partner for Cardinal, just like they are for their clients. After being stumped by a minor technical problem with their account, they reached out to CallRail’s superstar Support team, who helped them resolve the problem in less than two hours.
“No one else comes close to CallRail’s customer service,” Robowski says. “You guys really have one of the best customer service teams we’ve ever worked with, hands down.”
Powerful features that build client trust
In addition to the comprehensive analytics they’re able to track in CallRail, Cardinal has also found plenty of other ways to leverage the platform and show their clients the value of their work.
Part of this process involves Cardinal creating regular progress reports, so clients can see how their campaigns and initiatives are performing. Many clients appreciate Cardinal’s one-stop-shop approach and are happy to have them handle everything on the agency side of things.
To that end, CallRail’s powerful API allows them to create custom integrations that sync their call tracking data into their main CRM, and other platforms.
“Some of our less tech-savvy clients don’t want to mess around with a separate platform, so they prefer for us to create reports on our end,” Robowski says. “For that, we use the CallRail API to retrieve analytics and call data and then feed it into our CRM. Then we compile and publish the relevant reporting on our end, and give it right to the client.”
But some clients do like to get up close and personal with their data, she adds: “We also have clients who absolutely love this stuff. Every week, they’ll jump into their CallRail account, review their reporting, listen to their calls, tag the most important calls, and provide feedback on their analytics. Some of our clients love being very hands-on, so it’s great how CallRail is so easy for them.”
No matter which approach a client prefers, Cardinal’s main mission stays the same: They provide insight into the kinds of leads they’re driving to clients, and for how likely those leads are to convert. Call tracking is a key part of that value-proposition since it helps them optimize their campaigns according to the marketing channels or search keywords that are driving the most high-quality leads.
And while Cardinal uses call tracking primarily to analyzing inbound sales calls, they’ve found plenty of other CallRail features that have made a big difference for both them and their clients.
“Some of our clients run their own call centers. In cases like that, the call recording feature in CallRail is very helpful for training and quality assurance, so they can make sure their employees are performing well. This call recording feature for quality assurance is actually something that comes up more and more, both when we’re having conversations with our existing clients, and interviewing new prospective clients.”
Taking the guesswork out of agency marketing
Thanks to the analytics they gather via CallRail, Cardinal can be confident they’re providing clients with the best possible guidance for optimizing campaigns and driving new leads. And even more importantly, it empowers Cardinal to show clients their value as trusted partners and collaborators, who can handle everything from building a landing page to setting a marketing budget.
It’s why they encounter very little hesitation when they pitch call tracking to their clients. Quite the opposite, in fact — when clients hear about the benefits CallRail can bring, they’re eager to put the technology to work for their business.
“If a client hasn’t been tracking calls, we look at it as more of an opportunity to educate rather than giving them a hard sell,” Robowski says. “Without [call tracking], we’re basically flying blind for half of their lead attribution, which means it’s more difficult to make smart decisions about how to spend their advertising budget.”
In other words, no call tracking means no campaign data, which means a lot more guesswork when it comes to allocating your marketing budget and determining where to spend your limited ad dollars.
And they’ve got plenty of on-the-ground experience to back up that assertion — the impressive results Cardinal has produced for their clients are a testament to the effectiveness of their data-driven approach. In one case, a client saw their call volume grow by more than 40 percent year-on-year, which helped them reduce their overall cost per lead by about 24 percent.
Results like that are proof-positive of the value of call tracking, which is why Cardinal plans to stick with us for the long haul, Robowski says: “We love CallRail, and we’re big advocates for your service. From an agency perspective, we pitch the product as much as we can to our clients — it helps us manage campaigns, and it makes our work much more efficient by being able to track calls and share analytics through such an easy-to-use platform.”
