How to use call data and recordings to optimize conversion rates

This is a guest post written by Ellen Jantsch, Growth Marketer and Founder of Tuff Growth Marketing, an agency dedicated to helping startups unlock revenue.

We’ve been using CallRail for the last three years to help our clients with two core tasks :

• Measure the performance of our marketing campaigns with form and call tracking
• Collect valuable customer insights from call recordings to help us with our conversion projects

In this post, I’m going to dive deeper on the second use case. I’ll explain why we use CallRail for user research, how we do it, and how it helps us increase conversion and leads for our clients.

The importance of conversion rate optimization

Directing traffic to your website is great, but if that traffic doesn’t convert, the investment can be a waste of money. That’s why conversion rate optimization (CRO) is one of the most essential skills in a growth marketer’s toolbox.

CRO (conversion rate optimization) is convincing someone who is already aware of you to take action —buy a product, book a demo, give you a call, etc. And conversion projects include:

• Split testing new homepages (A/B testing)
• Shortening form length
• Calling people who clicked your ad
• Making your call-to-action (CTA) more direct
• Fixing your value prop
• Upgrading your website design
• Offering a free demo
• Building a landing page for a campaign

In this post, I’ll talk you through how we use CallRail for our conversion projects and explain how starting with customer research will ultimately help you increase your conversion more effectively.

Why start conversion projects with Customer Research?

Customer research at scale is hard. When you hear phrases like big data or quantifiable data, figuring out where to start can feel paralyzing. However, there’s one fundamental marketing skill we’re taught from pretty much day one of our lives ― listening.

In order to build or update a website that’s going to convert, ask yourself:

• Who is my target audience?
• What are their problems?
• How do they want to interact?

Answering these questions clearly will allow you to build a much stronger conversion strategy based on both qualitative and quantitative data.

Executing CRO tactics with intentionality will help you achieve much better results on those tactics. The good news is, if you take the time to look for it, your customers are generally already answering these questions for you. You just have to know where to look. This is where Conversation Intelligence and Call Tracking come in.

Customer segmentation: who, what and how

If your agency is already working with clients that engage their own customers over the phone, you can gather both qualitative and quantitative information through call data. The power of hearing your customer’s voice and the tone they use is unmatched.

Qualitative Approach

The qualitative approach we take at Tuff is a process of listening to 100+ phone calls with CallRail Conversation Intelligence, taking detailed notes, and listening for a few markers based on these questions: :

• What kind of words is the customer using?
• What was the very first problem they explained over the phone?
• What were they hearing, thinking, feeling, saying?

For this step, you can use a Google Sheet or your note taking tool of choice. Here’s the format we like to use:

• Caller name:_________
• First Question:_________
• Notable quotes:_________
• Goal:_________

Keep it simple and focus on listening. We wait until the phone call is over to add in their goal, it can sometimes take the whole call to assess. Here’s an example from a real estate company:

• Caller Name: Harry Potter
• First Question: How does the process work for selling?
• Notable quotes: “I had a realtor, they weren’t doing anything to make progress so I took over.”
• Goal: To sell property quickly

By the tenth phone call, you’ll notice a few trends in the customers’ goals. This is where you can begin to segment the customers based on their goals.

Create sections in your notes listing the goals which appear consistently (i.e. To sell property quickly’). Try to keep this to under five separate goals. There will be outliers and the occasional customer going down a different path, but you should be able to start segmenting customers into groups. In doing this, you have the powerful supporting data of quotes and first questions.

Quantitative Approach

The quantitative approach using Call Tracking is to export call data from over 1,000 phone calls to see larger trends such as:

• Time of day people are calling
• What page they visited before calling
• Where they are calling from

Any call tracking software should allow you to export a CSV full of helpful data.

This type of data can provide insights into what time of day callers have the most time. It can create insights around what kind of jobs they have, when they are most available, and times of highest engagement. This is where we can explore some of that customer research at scale.

Create a high-converting website by understanding your target users

Designing a great user experience requires understanding the problems different visitors have and then working to solve those problems. Conducting user research, like doing a call analysis, helps you understand your user’s needs, learn more about their pain points, and generate ideas for the website design or other conversion projects.

By taking the time to dive into CallRail and gather qualitative and quantitative data about customers, you can identify their pain points and make updates to your website, copy, and user experience that will increase your conversions and boost core KPIs.

This type of user research should help shape your website design and define guidelines that will help you convert more traffic.