For many marketers, most leads and conversions come in over the phone. From automotive to healthcare and home services to insurance, a significant percentage of the consumers who engage with your paid and organic channels contact your business by calling.
This is why your success hinges on how efficiently your channels drive phone leads and how well your business answers those calls and converts them to appointments or sales.
Three phone-based metrics — lead rate, answer rate, and conversion rate — hold the key to driving powerful improvements to the one metric your business cares about most: revenue. By making small improvements to each one, marketers can realize unprecedented gains in revenue growth from paid and organic channels.
Don’t believe it? Read on to see how this data can help you prove and improve the true impact of your marketing.
Phone Calls Are Your Most Valuable Leads From Paid and Organic Channels
For many industries, phone calls are the most valuable leads. If you are a marketer in healthcare, telecom, home services, insurance, financial services, automotive, or travel, 30% to 90% of your leads and conversions come from phone calls. These calls also convert to appointments or sales at a much higher rate than web forms — and for higher revenue.
But Not Every Inbound Call Is a Lead and Many Don’t Convert
Just because phone calls are your most valuable leads doesn’t mean every call to your business results in a conversion — most don’t.
You can see aggregated data below across industries and marketing channels. On average, 61% of calls to businesses are answered (meaning they connect in conversation with a person), 35% of those answered calls are leads, and 37% of those leads that speak to a person convert on the call.
Small Improvements to 3 Phone Lead Metrics Make a Big Impact on Revenue
The good news for marketers is that if you only make small improvements to those three phone lead metrics — lead rate, answer rate, and conversion rate — you can make a big improvement to your marketing’s impact on business results.
To illustrate, let’s use an example of a Google Ads campaign where the marketer spent $4,000 and drove 1,000 calls to their business. If you follow the table on the left in the image below, you see that, based on the averages listed above for 1,000 calls:
- 610 callers spoke to a person (61%)
- 213 of those calls were leads (35%)
- 79 of those leads converted on the call (37%)
- Resulting in $39,500 in revenue (if we assume an average of $500 per conversion for this fictitious business) at a $51 CPA
Not bad, right? If you improve the answer rate, lead rate, and conversion rate by just five percentage points each, for that same $4,000 and 1,000 calls, you get:
- 660 callers speaking to a person
- 264 of those calls were leads
- 111 of those leads converted on the call
- Resulting in $55,500 in revenue at a $36 CPA
That’s a 40% improvement in conversions, revenue, and CPA! Pretty amazing, and it only required small improvements to those three phone lead metrics.
How to Improve Your Marketing Results by Improving 3 Phone Lead Metrics
1. Benchmark the Performance of Your Paid and Organic Channels
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. The first step is to gather data on the efficiency of your paid and organic channels in driving phone leads, as well as how well your business answers and converts those calls.
Marketers using Invoca get this data from the Lead Conversion Dashboard. Invoca tracks the marketing source of every call and uses AI to analyze the conversation to measure if the call was answered, if it is a lead, and if it resulted in a conversion. The Lead Conversion Dashboard visualizes this data so you can benchmark and compare performance for both your paid and organic channels.
You can see which channels are working best and which are underperforming relative to the others. You can also see how well your business is answering and converting calls from each channel. This data is critical and serves as the foundation from which improvements can be made and measured.
2. Strategies to Improve Your Phone Lead Rates
If you’re looking to improve the phone lead rates of your paid channels, consider these strategies:
- Shift Ad Budget to What’s Really Working: Use phone lead and conversion rate data to allocate budget to the channels driving your best ROAS and away from ones that are driving poorer results.
- Use Call Value to Improve Smart Bidding: Use Invoca to pass phone lead and conversion data to ad platforms like Google Ads and Meta to fuel better optimizations that improve campaign efficiency and results.
- Use Call Data to Improve Ad Targeting: Retarget phone leads that don’t convert, suppress converted and non-lead callers from seeing your ads, and add your most valuable calls to your lookalike campaigns to find new audiences likely to convert.
- Tap Into the Voice of Your Customers: Use what callers say when they call your business to better understand your consumers – including what they value about your products and services – and refine your ad messaging and landing pages content to increase engagement.
If you’re looking to improve the phone lead rates of your organic channels, consider these strategies:
- Optimize for What’s Driving the Most Phone Leads: Dive deeper into your data to see what landing pages, emails, social posts, and other organic content and campaigns are driving the most phone leads – then duplicate what works.
- Use What Callers Ask About to Improve SEO: If your leads are asking about a particular question or topic when they call, other potential leads may be searching for the same thing online. Adding answers to caller questions to your product and service pages, FAQs, and blogs and creating content for topics of interest helps your site show up in more search queries, attract more qualified visitors, and improve the likelihood they become leads.
3. Strategies to Improve Your Call Answer Rates
No matter how well your marketing channels generate phone leads, your performance suffers if your business isn’t answering them. Marketers can use Invoca reports to see what percentage of calls to locations and contact centers connect in conversation with a person. If you wish to improve answer rates:
- Use Missed Call Data to Inform Staffing: Ensure your contact centers and locations are properly staffed to handle heavier call times.
- Pause Ads When You’re Closed: Don’t run campaigns when your locations or contact centers are closed and can’t answer calls.
- Route Callers by Their Intent and Value: Use Invoca PreSense or IVRs to route calls based on intent to the right agent or staff right away. This helps your acquisition-focused agents stop wasting time with non-leads calls while good leads abandon their calls rather than continue to wait on hold.
- Identity Website Issues Causing People to Call: Improve answer rates by fixing website form issues and gaps in content or confusing language causing unnecessary calls to your business. Less calls means shorter wait times and less hang-ups.
4. Strategies to Improve Your Phone Lead Conversion Rates
If your marketing channels are driving high volumes of phone leads that your business isn’t converting, consider these strategies to improve performance:
- Prioritize Your Most Valuable Calls: Use Invoca PreSense to route your best lead calls directly to the right contact center agent, skipping your IVR. Routing with PreSense has doubled conversion rates for many Invoca customers.
- Route More Calls to Top Performers: Analyze phone lead conversion rates by contact center agent and location in Invoca to route a higher percentage of phone leads to your top performers.
- Pass Data on Callers to Agents: Use Invoca PreSense to arm contact center agents with the caller’s digital journey to improve call outcomes and average handle times
- Use AI to Score Call Handling Performance: Have AI automatically score how calls are handled to learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to coach your contact center agents and locations on how to improve conversion rates.
Take Your First Steps to Improving Phone Leads and Conversions
Again, you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so if you want to see big improvements in conversions and revenue, start by getting the right data. Request a demo of Invoca, and our team will show you the data you need to measure your marketing’s performance. We will also share the strategies others in your industry are using to significantly increase their marketing impact on business results.
