For all the digital advances that marketing strategies have made over the past few decades, that telephone sitting on your office desk still looms large as a tool for interacting with leads and expanding your customer base.
The telephone — and prospects and customers calling your business — remains an important and effective marketing and sales channel, no matter how digital you’ve become. BrightLocal research from 2019 revealed that 60% of people prefer to contact a small business via a phone. The consumer still likes to call and talk, and not only do you need to answer, but you also should be gathering marketing data and insight from those calls.
Enterprise call tracking can help turn inbound phone calls into a lead generation and reporting machine. With this solution, each call and conversation matters — and contributes to marketing success.
What is enterprise call tracking?
People calling your business aren’t just customers and potential customers — they represent bits of marketing intelligence that drive and refine the ways you reach leads and serve customers.
Even if someone calls from a non-digital source, such as a billboard or print ad, you should still derive data from the interaction. Enterprise call tracking provides that data. The digital marketplace demands you have this knowledge; the time for guessing the customer journey of callers has long passed.
At its base level, call tracking automatically identifies the source from which someone found your phone number and dialed your business. By assigning a unique number based on source, channel, campaign, or time period, the tracking software not only knows what drove the phone call but also generates valuable data. Are your radio ads leading to customers? Are people who see a billboard likely to respond to emails after they call you? Do your print ads provide an ROI? Call tracking can answer these questions and more.
Non-digital marketing channels aren’t the only beneficiaries of call analytics and tracking. As already stated, some customers prefer the directness of a phone call — but maybe not right away. So if a lead visits your website and decides to call, the number they find on your site can tell you when they visited and what pages they browsed. Enterprise call tracking gathers this data and delivers even more refined marketing intelligence. But call tracking isn’t just for marketers.
Your call tracking software should not be implemented or used in a silo when considering enterprise applications.
What differentiates enterprise call tracking is the ability to apply call analytics, trends, and attribution data to strategic initiatives across your entire organization, from marketing to sales to customer service.
When your marketing team, call center, BDRs, SDRs, executive leadership, customer service teams, and more have access to your enterprise call tracking software, you can easily track important details of your customers’ lifecycle with your brand like:
- Effective touchpoints for high value customers
- Sentiment towards your brand and processes
- Most effective communication methods
- The overall customer experience with your brand
What to look for in an enterprise call tracking solution
Call tracking software eliminates the need — and tedium — of a person trying to compile all this data by hand. Naturally, the conversation between the caller and your employee or call center is vital to building the relationship, but letting the software handle the finer reporting saves time and produces stronger metrics.
That said, the solution you choose must be reliable and rich with features and convenience. Here are some things you should look for when considering an enterprise call tracking platform:
Easy implementation and setup
Simple installation and ease of use are no-brainers with any piece of marketing software.
With call tracking, a painless implementation is especially important so that you can start campaigns almost right away without disrupting your current phone system and reporting.
Many non-digital marketing campaigns are scheduled far in advance and phone numbers need to be ready before final creative is approved. Thus, your call tracking platform — and your comfort with the solution — must be ready also.
Besides a stress-free setup, a quality call tracking platform should seamlessly integrate with existing marketing and sales software. Why? Consider the opportunities for your marketing team if they could integrate call analytics data into its marketing automation platform.
Data needs to flow back and forth for inbound phone calls, and the easier you can facilitate that, the more marketing intelligence the call analytics will yield.
Dynamic number insertion
A base feature of call tracking is the ability to generate unique phone numbers for whatever campaign you’re launching. Dynamic number insertion (DNI) applies that principle to your website itself. Someone visits your site, and depending on how they arrived there, a specific phone number is displayed so that if and when they call, you know what initially led them to your site.
For example, if a lead clicks on a Google ad, DNI can be configured to show a phone number — anywhere on your website — just for people who are clicking on your PPC assets. DNI can be configured as narrowly as you want, down to individual campaigns, to generate the strongest data possible.
Moreover, when that call comes in, you’ll have a better idea of the type of lead who might be on the other end. Someone arriving via a link you included in a description of a TikTok video may have different buyer goals than someone who clicked on a Facebook post — with DNI, you’ll know that before you even answer the call.
Robust reporting
Enterprise call tracking compiles data, but it won’t matter if the metrics aren’t thorough. Comprehensive data pinpoints wins and losses while providing the insight you need to fuel your current and future strategy, as well as attribution reporting.
When considering an enterprise call tracking tool, ask about use cases for conversion tracking, marketing campaign analytics, sales process reporting, and customer relationship management data.
However, thorough metrics shouldn’t be indecipherable. The best call tracking software presents its data in concise, easy-to-handle reports so you benefit from the numbers — rather than getting bogged down in them.
Special consideration: If you are already using another analytics platform or data aggregator to track conversions and campaign performance across your organization, ask about available integrations with your enterprise call tracking software to ensure it all works together.
Conversation intelligence
Getting people to call your business represents a key challenge of your marketing strategy. What you say to those people when they call feels like it should be the easy part — but it’s far more complex than many organizations realize. Reviewing what was said is also important.
Conversation intelligence offers a way to take your call tracking to the next level by transcribing and analyzing the interaction between the caller and your business.
This feature can identify keywords you and the lead say that portend conversions and sales. Conversation intelligence can also determine how strong a lead a caller might be, thus giving you more insight on how to market to and nurture that person toward a purchase.
Conversation intelligence is especially beneficial for teams looking to implement call tracking to monitor and improve quality of inbound calls, identify common challenges or pain points in sales calls, or FAQs from customers.
Call recording
Call recording offers another way to review and analyze the conversations from certain call tracking numbers, or from outbound calls. Local, state, and federal regulations may govern how or if a call can be recorded, but good software also helps you with compliance (e.g., the ability to set up a pre-call announcement that the call “may be monitored for quality purposes”).
Benefits of enterprise call tracking
Call tracking provides immediate and long-term benefits that fit in nicely with your overall marketing and sales goals. These advantages include:
- Maximized marketing ROI: Digital and non-digital campaigns alike cost money and can get expensive, so your marketers need to know what kind of return they are bringing in and maximize the results. Call tracking fills in the unknowns created by callers and helps you realize an ROI or adjust your strategy.
- Optimized campaigns: Call tracking generates strong data for sales teams, marketers, and customer service reps, from which you can determine which marketing campaigns are thriving or struggling, as well as what keywords and messaging are resonating with leads. From there, campaigns can be modified to produce the best results. Sometimes, just a small tweak is all you need, but you won’t be sure without call tracking’s reporting.
- New revenue opportunities: The uncertainty and perceived lack of relevance with non-digital campaigns may stop many businesses from considering a phone-driven strategy. Call tracking shows that such campaigns are still relevant, thus opening up a new world of possibilities for businesses that feel their digital efforts are in a rut.
- Greater reach: Not all of your potential customers may be online, and many just prefer talking to a live person. Call tracking delivers the confidence you need to design campaigns to reach these prospects and measure how effective you are in doing so.
- Stronger lead nurturing: Call tracking captures intelligence anywhere in the funnel that someone decides to call you from, whether it’s a first contact or close to a sale. Subsequently, you’ll be able to better tailor your lead nurturing efforts to where leads are along the buyer journey and what they say during their phone interactions with you.
A solution for all industries
Enterprise call tracking offers these benefits for a wide variety of enterprises and industries — and in 2020, that list has grown because customers who prefer person-to-person interactions can’t engage with businesses face to face. Businesses that are well-suited for inbound call tracking include:
- Healthcare
- Real estate
- Auto repair/service
- Home repair/renovation
- IT and SaaS
- Insurance
- Financial services
- Veterinary
Even if your business isn’t on this list, call tracking can still help quantify your marketing campaigns, inform your decisions, and help you better understand who is calling you and why. Furthermore, you don’t need to be a marketing expert to take advantage of the benefits that call tracking provides.
