Like a lot of marketers, you’re probably searching for ways to get better returns out of a stagnant or shrinking campaign budget. It can feel like re-squeezing a pile of decimated limes to make one more margarita at the end of a hot summer day. You need the juice, but there’s nothing left to give and there’s no way you’re walking to the store in your flip-flops.
For marketers whose campaigns drive customers to convert on the phone, there’s a big ol’ pile of fresh limes hiding in the corner — data from marketing-driven phone calls.
Here’s how you can get that sweet, sweet customer data juice to optimize your campaigns and drive more revenue from every marketing dollar you spend.
Call tracking software like Invoca allows marketers to get data from phone conversations with customers to get marketing attribution for phone calls and get visibility into call outcomes. For example, if you call a business that’s using call tracking, they can tell what ads, web pages, and even the keywords helped drive you to call.
Once a customer is on the phone, that’s when AI-powered conversation analytics kicks in. Using AI, Invoca can analyze conversations to detect the outcome of the call, like whether or not the caller got a quote, set an appointment, or made a purchase. You can then use that data to get attribution for marketing campaigns and optimize ads, web pages, social media, and other advertising mediums to get more high-value customers on the phone. You can also use call tracking data to improve online experiences and conversion rates.
Without call tracking, it’s impossible to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts that drive sales calls because your data trail goes cold when potential customers pick up the phone.
Training an AI model may sound like a daunting task to take on, but not with Invoca! Our Signal AI Studio offers no-code UI that speeds you through the process of training a custom AI model. You simply tell it the insight you want to measure, and Signal AI Studio shows you transcribed examples from your calls that either fit or don’t fit that insight. It learns with every response, creating a new AI model in no time.
Custom AI models from Signal AI Studio can accurately detect virtually any insight or topic from conversations, including:
Learn more about how Signal AI Studio works here
If you’re not using call tracking today and your marketing campaigns drive leads to call and set appointments, make purchases, or get quotes, you’re probably not accounting for 20-50% of the conversions you drive. This results in inaccurate measurement of your results, wasted ad spend, and even poor customer experiences that drive down your conversion rate.
Here are five ways that you can use call tracking to optimize your campaigns and get credit for every conversion that you drive.
Many marketers rely on counting the number of calls that their campaigns drive in order to determine performance. Just counting calls is not an accurate measure of the success of your campaigns because many of those calls might not be conversions—they could be customer service calls, people calling for driving directions, or anything else you can think of that’s not a conversion.
Here’s an example of how using call volume instead of conversion volume throws everything off. If you’re just looking at call volume, you would put your money behind the “Corp Bank Trust” keyword. But once you can see the conversions that happen on the phone, you’ll see you put the money in the wrong place as “first-time mortgage” was actually driving more conversions.
Additionally, you may not be counting calls that come from organic and direct website traffic, email campaigns, direct mail, and other channels where counting calls is difficult. This means you’re selling yourself short and not getting credit for all of the conversions that you drive. Either way, using call volume for attributing conversions throws off all of your calculations.
With AI-powered call tracking, you can automatically assign unique phone numbers to each campaign and each caller, so you know exactly where every call your marketing drives comes from.
This gives you 1:1 attribution and conversion data that you can use to accurately calculate and report on your CPA and return on ad spend. Not only that, you can rest assured that you’re getting credit for every conversion that your budget drives.
If you’re guessing about how many conversions your ads and keyword bids are driving over the phone, you’re likely overestimating your CPA and under-reporting your ROAS. If you’re depending on data from Google Ads, unfortunately it doesn’t provide accurate data on phone call conversions natively the way it does online conversions. For that, you should use a call tracking solution like Invoca.
Invoca provides a complete solution for attributing and analyzing phone call conversions from Google Ads and other ad platforms, making it easy for you to get the right data on calls in your Google Ads accounts to optimize Smart Bidding and Data–Driven Attribution modeling (DDA). We’re using Google Ads as an example here, but you can use Invoca in a similar fashion with virtually any ad platform. With Invoca you can:
Using call tracking data to improve marketing efficiency doesn't end at optimization for the first purchase. You can orchestrate the ongoing customer journey with conversation data, too. You know when, what, and why your customers bought, so you can get them in the right nurture to upgrade them or make sure they renew or return. You can also retarget folks with high intent to buy who didn’t convert to keep your brand top of mind.
Better yet, you can use conversion data from conversations to suppress ads to people who already made a purchase, so you’re not wasting ad spend annoying customers with ads for things they already bought.
What it comes down to is this conversation data allows you to get attribution for revenue from call conversion you drive so you can spend smarter — on driving customer acquisition.
One assumption that marketers often make about call tracking is that it’s only used to optimize marketing to drive more conversions over the phone. While that’s nice, converting customers on the phone is more expensive than converting them online. With Invoca, you can see exactly where customers are dropping out of the online shopping experience and calling.
With this data in hand, you can pinpoint problems in the digital experience and make precise changes that will drive more customers to buy online if that’s what they want to do.
By integrating Invoca data with digital experience platforms like Adobe Experience Cloud, FullStory, Auryc, Decibel, and others, you can dig even deeper to see exactly what customers are up to on the website before they call, identify digital leakage points, and quickly diagnose and fix problems that are preventing people from converting online.
This will increase your online conversion rates, enable you to provide great experiences that attract and retain more customers, and keep calls for low-value routine purchases out of the contact center to further reduce your acquisition costs.
Most marketers don’t think about how the call experience can impact their conversion rates, and rightfully so. The contact center is siloed far and away from marketing, and you don’t usually have much control over what happens once a customer decides to pick up the phone.
With Invoca, you can collaborate better with the contact center or business locations through shared data to make sure callers have a better experience. The calls from your ads and web pages can be routed to the contact center or individual business locations based on digital intent signals. By determining things like product interest, where the customer was on the website, promos they clicked on, what they have in their cart, and more, you can make sure calls are getting routed to the right place the first time.
By reducing transfers and hold times, your customers are going to be more likely to convert and less likely to hang up before they can complete a purchase. This means a better conversion rate for you and happier, more loyal customers. It’s a win-win.
When customer experience issues occur on the phone, it's important to get this information in real time so your team can follow up quickly to recover sales. Smart alerts are powered by Invoca’s Signal AI technology, so they can notify you about virtually anything occurring on calls. They're also easy to configure – you simply decide what topic or metric you want an alert for, who gets it, when, and how often. For example, you can set up alerts at each location for when missed calls reach a certain threshold. This will allow your locations to quickly identify issues and correct them to increase conversion rates.
Another key aspect of improving the call experience is making sure agents handle customer inquiries effectively — that means keeping tabs on caller sentiment. When it comes to analyzing sentiment, most speech analytics tools only track the overall sentiment of a call, flagging a call as either “positive” or “negative.” But many marketers say that call-level sentiment isn’t particularly useful or actionable.
We believe that the real opportunity lies in the ability to track caller and agent sentiment separately, and monitor how it changes throughout a conversation. So we built our sentiment analysis solution to not only track the individual sentiment of the caller and the agent separately, but also how it changes throughout the call. This makes it possible to monitor how effective agents are at turning a callers’ negative sentiment into positive, as an example. You can, in turn, use this data to collaborate with your contact center team to deliver better customer experiences.
Get the Ultimate Guide to Conversation Intelligence for Marketers to see how you can optimize your marketing and get more from every dollar that you spend.