Brief intro to call tracking
Call tracking has been around for ages. What we all know as caller ID has been in use since the late 1970's. At first, only basic information was available to an end user; a caller’s number, caller ID and geographical location. As sales and advertising industry demands evolved over time, further in-depth call tracking systems have been developed and are still continuing to evolve.
Retreaver offers a unique call tracking system which helps our customers gain valuable insight about their callers by tracking data from prior web activity - including information passed along from site to site and from previous engagements accessed from customer relationship management databases.
Advancements in data collection have enabled positive contributions for both customers and users alike, call tracking provides features for technically inclined marketers and sales agents who are always looking to find an edge in their industries. These descriptive customer profiles have helped customers find the products they seek in a quick hassle-free environment.
Who is using call tracking today?
From small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, industries have begun to take advantage of their inbound phone calls to gain insight into their customers needs. As smartphone usage and online shopping become more widespread, it's up to businesses to fill in these new information gaps through call tracking.
Regardless of advertising budgets (or lack thereof, in some cases), all businesses dealing with inbound calls should be using call tracking to help optimize their advertisement effectiveness.
Even small businesses receiving less than 100 calls per month benefit from gathering customer profiles and engagements to better understand where their customers are coming from, and learn where they should be targeting their advertising efforts to drive more future sales to their business.
On the other end of the spectrum, large businesses who handle thousands of calls a month (or
more) rely on call tracking to help organize and handle the large volume of calls effectively. Call
tracking offers several features that can benefit an enterprise company, and act as a crucial part
of the enterprise tech stack by:
- Helping businesses manage large call volumes.
- Lowering advertising overhead by boosting audience targeting efficiency.
- Improving sales conversions by scaling their productivity.
Top 10 benefits to call tracking
1)
Mobile engagements are quickly rising. Stay ahead of the curve!
Mobile usage rates are increasing, and with it brings valuable data reflecting consumers’ habits, behavior's, and sales journeys. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses must create effective solutions to collect this consumer data through call tracking. Call tracking can help analyze sales journeys across multiple websites and then package the information to create descriptive customer profiles that sales agents on the other end can leverage to optimize sales results.
2)
Help marketers tweak their advertisements through data-driven results
Marketers often report that measuring ROI from their activities is one of their biggest challenges. Without having access to any metrics or results of your actions, how could you know what works and what doesn’t? How can marketers determine their next steps? Supplying companies with call tracking data allows marketers to see how much traffic a particular advertisement generates, impacting future directions of a company’s marketing activities.
Any experienced marketer can tell you that burning through an ad budget is easy, but generating genuine traffic and acquiring profitable leads is becoming increasingly difficult. Using data from call tracking can help marketers better understand their results and clearly show which advertisements are working and which need to be reviewed.
3)
Gather granular data to better control your ad-spend budget
Advertisements are expensive, and as more consumers move towards online shopping, the cost of customer acquisition becomes increasingly more competitive for all businesses. The battle for consumer attention is ramping up, and whether on social media, search engines or traditional advertising mediums, ad expenses are climbing quickly, and the cost of branding and customer acquisition is rising with it.
Use call tracking and sales attribution to discontinue ineffective advertisements and put that money towards better performing keywords or demographics, scaling marketing effectiveness and making the most of your advertising budget.
4)
Study customers’ sales journey to optimize the sales funnel
Curious to find out what is driving traffic to product pages? Was it an organic search, a paid ad or certain social media posts? Better yet, which one of these mediums generated the most income? Call tracking can analyze prospective leads from impression to sale so companies can get the full sales attribution picture.
Parameter mapping and real-time page tracking enables our users to send data from site to site, analyzing the sales journey of leads to paint a descriptive picture of their sales funnel. For example, a majority of a company’s customers might be coming in from organic search results, however the highest valued customers engaged with the brand on LinkedIn. Perhaps certain keywords, advertisements, or search queries led to higher sales margins and more successful conversions. This is information any marketer should know! Call tracking helps you focus on goals that matter - knowing a customer’s sales journey is critical to understanding and improving your sales funnel.
5)
Learn more about your customers and their needs
Using our real-time page tracking and parameter mapping features enables our users to analyze details about their customers’ sales journeys, including which pages or sites the caller visited prior to calling.
By having this information on hand, relevant information can be passed onto a salesperson prior to routing the call. Customers benefit from a personalized call experience, and sales teams are better prepared to answer any questions or concerns; ultimately, driving higher conversions and happier customers.
6)
Easily build a contact list of previous customers
Satisfied customers become repeat customers. And the more a company knows about their customers, the better they are able to serve them. Call tracking users receive fundamental information from every call such as the caller’s number, name, location, reason for calling and the lead source that generated the call by placing tracked numbers on your advertisements.
Using webhooks, data can be automatically transferred at the end of a call to any destination (most commonly to a customer-relationship management (CRM) tool).
Using Customer-relationship management tools such as SalesForce or Hubspot can have great benefits for a business owner. By automatically storing contacts and their relevant call attributes after each sale, a customer contact list can be quickly compiled, and past customers can be retargeted based on specific attributes for future conversions. The same data can also be reapplied back to those customers if they call again, ensuring a consistent customer experience across various campaigns and endpoints.
7)
Boost outreach through omnichannel marketing
Call tracking can help businesses target key audiences through localization, boosting impressions and sales. By segmenting customers based on tagged attributes, companies have an advantage when connecting with those unique customers to serve them.
If you run an organization with several locations, you can have customers calling in from all over the world, however your advertising campaign is identical for all locations. Call tracking can enable you to still advertise using a single number or contact point, and then as calls come in they will be tagged and routed according to the logic you have created.
For example, if a customer is searching for a business, he or she may visit a single landing page or call the main line. However, without call tracking, there is no discernible way to identify what their intention is, or what it is they may be searching for. Perhaps they just wish to speak to a general support line and ask some questions, or maybe they are in a new city and are looking to find a local branch quickly. Call tracking will divert general traffic to main support/sales lines and any region-specific requests can be automatically routed to a sales person designated to handle a specific branch.
8)
Give your sales team the tools & information they need
By using whispers to deliver information to call agents prior to being connected, sales teams can
answer questions, identify concerns and close sales faster through descriptive customer profiles.
The ability to directly ping agents through email or text to notify of incoming VIP callers or
engagements using Zapier ensures important calls are not missed. Receiving more volume than
average and experiencing long hold times? Using Retreaver’s click-to-call functionality bypasses
the need for tedious hold times, as valuable leads will automatically receive a call once an agent
becomes available.
Create and analyze transcripts of your calls automatically using VoiceBase. Transcripts of calls can be created and analyzed to better understand the flow of calls and how agents handle them. Keyword spotting analysis can be used to learn if certain products or competitors are being mentioned, as well as spot trends and insights. In the past, many organizations had to manually analyze thousands of recorded calls leading to many missed opportunities and wasted hours. With Retreaver, call transcriptions and keyword flagging can be utilized by our clients to learn more about their customers’ prime concerns.
9)
Handle more calls through tagging, tracking and routing
Call tracking helps scale businesses by reducing employees’ manual work load and company operating costs. Businesses that utilize several tools across various tech stacks are always delighted to experience the flexibility that Retreaver's call tracking platform can offer.
Call tracking pays for itself; it reduces workload, eliminates ineffective advertising costs, and guides sales teams through any call to ensure they always have all the information needed to convert a call quickly and effectively.
Retreaver prides ourselves in our flexibility and customization; we allow our clients to create configurable campaigns, design unique routing rules, set priority based call endpoints, and filter and route calls automatically to the best agent that is available to handle that call. Retreaver can integrate with all third party solutions to ensure clients get the most out of their data.
The Retreaver team is always expanding its features list and we listen to our customers for new ideas.
Have a suggestion for Retreaver? Contact our support team and we can explore ways to make it happen.
10)
Use gathered data to explore potential growth opportunities
Data is valuable. The key to getting (and maintaining) an edge in any industry is through leveraging data to explore potential revenue opportunities.
The data gathered from call tracking can be analyzed to obtain crucial information that drives the development of product or service changes. For example, if customers particularly enjoy a particular feature of a product or service, a company may want to consider looking into further development in that specific line. In the same vein, if customers have frequent complaints or questions about a particular product, it would be worthwhile to examine what that issue is and resolve it as soon as it becomes mentioned.
Retreaver has several integrations that can help modify, analyze and store the valuable sales data you've gathered. Use our webhook functionality and Zapier to forward any collected tags to a third party application of your choice. Your phone calls have valuable untapped data; start using it!
Don't be left in the dark when it comes to customer analytics!
Contact our sales team for an online demonstration, The Retreaver platform will provide you with all the resources you need to optimize your advertising outreach, maximize sales results and provide excellent customer service over the phone!