If marketing were like Pokemon, call tracking would be the improved form of caller ID. Both might be overlooked as phone marketing has become less common in the age of the Internet. However, technological advances actually make call tracking more cost effective, and your company can try out various solutions without hardware installation, thanks to the Web.
What Is Call Tracking:
Call tracking does much more than tell you the duration of a call. With call tracking, you can change how your number will appear on caller ID on the recipient’s phone, record call conversations for quality purposes and track missed calls. For incoming calls, tracking may analyze the location of callers and frequency over the course of the day, allowing you to see who is most likely to call and when.
How Does Call Tracking Work:
In general, call tracking revolves around having different phone numbers for different topics or keywords. You can even use different numbers on each of your printed materials to determine whether your catalog does better than your business card. Those may be local or toll-free (800) numbers that your customers can use to contact your company.
Benefits of the Internet for Call Back Systems:
Before the advent of the Internet, determining ROI for your marketing campaigns was difficult an inaccurate. Now, your can simply sign up with online services and target your campaigns to consumers who are most interested — and during the time when they’re most likely to pay attention.
The Internet also helps you increase leads with call-back software that allows you to call someone as soon as they click a button after entering their phone number. Websites like FindMyPhone use this software to enable users to call themselves from the Internet to locate a lost phone, but you could do something similar to connect with potential customers.
Of course, you can use call tracking in conjunction with your digital campaigns. Tracking conversation chains that include phone calls typically relies on cookies. If the user deletes cookies from her computer, this may break the chain. However, cookies still provide more accuracy than previous methods of tracking calls.
While consumers might be more likely to make a purchase after talking to one of your staff members over the phone, adding a call into the chain of events that occurred after a consumer first landed on your site made it difficult to track conversions. Tracking software can help your business see that a customer visited your website, then called you — and whether the customer returns to the site to complete a purchase.
Improvements to Call Tracking:
Call tracking software will continue to improve in the future. For example, the Internet adds challenges to tracking calls because some numbers are generated automatically, and some customers prefer a static number that they can remember or add to their phone books. Furthermore, software will have to find a way to work around issues with cleared cookies. Solutions to those issues are just over the horizon, however.
