If you’re making decisions about your website and using data to optimize your marketing, you need to think about the visitors who call you and convert over the phone.
In an increasingly mobile world, customers are more likely than ever before to be visiting your website on mobile then dialing your business to get more information or make a purchase. Even though digital channels drive engagement online, people still want to talk.
As a marketer, you probably understand that these calls are valuable — inbound calls have high conversion rates and provide a treasure trove of information about your customers. But how do you drive more calls that lead to sales? How are you attributing conversions that happen over the phone?
Here are 10 ways to address this blind spot by tapping into the gold mine of insights from phone conversations:
1. Define Lead Quality
Identify the characteristics of qualified versus unqualified leads to improve marketing and sales performance. For instance, by identifying key phrases like “place an order” or “credit card number” versus “customer support” and “account number.”
2. Optimize Your Campaigns
Track what happens on your calls to understand which marketing programs lead to calls that convert to revenue. Increase spend on those campaigns and minimize spend on campaigns that drive low-converting calls.
3. Finesse Your Messaging
Check which products or promotions callers are mentioning on the phone, and make sure your messaging aligns with their goals and pain points. For example, if customers keep bringing up a specific product, you know it’s time to highlight it on your website.
4. Monitor the Competitive Landscape
See which competitors are mentioned most often to arm your sales teams with the right messaging. If your customers keep mentioning the same competitor, you may need to find new ways of differentiating yourself.
5. Build Better Buyer Personas
Understand the language your key buyer personas use, what products interest them and which marketing campaigns they prefer. These insights will bring life to your buyer personas so your sales and marketing teams know exactly who they’re talking to.
6. Test Your Sales Scripts
Marketers are always updating their content and conducting A/B tests to figure out what works best. Do the same with your sales scripts: test two of them and see which words and phrases result in more sales, and identify the specific messages that contribute to sales won or lost.
7. Identify Effective Search Terms
How many of your PPC keywords truly resonate with your audience? By tracking keywords that relate to your product or service during customer conversations, you can create PPC campaigns based on proven buyer pain points and eliminate the guessing game.
8. Analyze Legit Leads Only
When analyzing calls, it’s important to know which are legitimate leads and which would have been best left unanswered. For instance, if another company has a similar name but sells an entirely different product, you can scan for those keywords and differentiate between quality prospects and people who dialed the wrong number.
9. Improve Customer Experience
Understanding the needs and motivations of your callers helps you better understand the best way to set up your voice prompts and routing to provide the best possible caller experience. Understand what happened on the call to automatically trigger a specialized lead nurturing track.
10. Prove Marketing ROI
Calls are marketers’ biggest blind spot when it comes to attribution. Get credit for conversations that happen over the phone in near real-time rather than weeks or months down the road. If you know what customers say during an inbound call, you can determine which resulted in a purchase or follow-up action. A big part of this is conversation intelligence, which is a technology that scans inbound customer calls for keywords and phrases so you can spot patterns
Improve Your Marketing By Learning From Actual Conversations
Making data-driven marketing decisions involves connecting the dots between all customer interactions, across both online and offline channels. Rather than guessing what happens during conversations with your customers and making decisions based on incomplete data, you can truly optimize your marketing by capturing insights from inbound phone calls.
About the Author: Kyle Christensen is a SaaS veteran, having spent over 15 years working in enterprise software. Before Invoca, he was a VP of Marketing at Responsys, a leader cloud platform for cross-channel digital marketing, where he launched the company’s mobile product line. He has also served in senior strategic product marketing and management roles at Zuora and at Salesforce.com. He holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BS in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Comments (4)