The phone is powerful. I’d even go so far as to say it’s the most dynamic, efficient and practical weapon in the small business arsenal. It’s a direct link to your customers that provides a unique opportunity to answer questions, overcome objections and make a personal connection that will most likely lead to a sale and have a lasting impact on customer loyalty.
…THE REAL POTENTIAL DOESN’T JUST LIE IN RECEIVING PHONE CALLS…
Too often small business owners aren’t tapping the phone for its full potential to grow their business. But they should – calls ranked #1 in delivering the highest ROI for small businesses (coming in ahead of in-person visits and online forms respectively). Why? Because the real potential doesn’t just lie in receiving phone calls – the phone’s strongest ally involves call tracking, analytics and optimization of campaigns. Call marketing is one of the easiest ways to increase quality traffic, improve your marketing efforts, and boost ROI. What more can a self-employed business owner with limited resources ask for?
Track Calls Like Clicks
Many small businesses are taking advantage of online media because of its relative ease, cost efficiency and measurability. You can see exactly how many people visited your website or clicked your ad, and made a purchase. Call tracking gives you the same visibility into the performance of all your call-based marketing campaigns – online, offline and via mobile.
Improving Online Marketing Performance
It may seem counter-intuitive to drive phone calls from online sources, but consider that adding a phone number to online ads can improve click-through rates by 5-30%! That’s a lot more clicks and traffic, with little effort on your part. The best part is that the phone calls you’ll be driving will convert 30-50% of the time. Compare that to the puny single-digit conversion rates of clicks.
Getting to the Source
By assigning a unique phone number to each marketing campaign you can see exactly where a caller came from. Were they referred by a business card, billboard, TV or radio commercial, newspaper ad, or direct mail campaign? The same applies for all online sources that result in a call, whether it’s your website, a banner ad, referring domain, or pay-per-click ad. With dynamically generated phone numbers that appear on your website, you can even track which keywords translated into a phone call, so you can bid on the keywords that really matter and ditch the ones that don’t.
Know Your Customer
Call tracking not only provides key analytics regarding the source of your calls, it also arms you with useful information regarding your audience. Are your callers mostly mobile, landline users or a mix of both? Are they local callers? Do they buy high or low-ticket items or services? Using call tracking to better understand your phone customers gives you the insights to create better marketing that will resonate with your audience. For example, if most of your callers are mobile, you can invest more of your marketing budget into online mobile campaigns with concise, actionable messages.
More Data Means More Sales
Because every call is accompanied by tons of data about your audience and the effectiveness of your call-based campaigns and marketing channels, you’re better equipped to drive more traffic. And since it’s so easy to set up new online campaigns and generate new tracking numbers, you can always test campaigns and keep on improving.
