The Challenge
Like many consumers making complex purchase decisions, DIRECTV customers cross multiple touchpoints from search, websites, and mobile before completing their purchases on the phone.
This multi-channel buying journey presented DIRECTV with tremendous potential to enhance its marketing effectiveness and customer experience. The company discovered that its digital marketing campaigns were successfully driving valuable offline conversions through phone calls, but it needed to build stronger attribution between its digital efforts and call outcomes.
DIRECTV could unlock the ability for its marketing algorithms to optimize more effectively and create significantly more personalized customer experiences by connecting the entire buying journey.
DIRECTV's marketing technology team, led by Nesby Ingram, Manager of Lead Marketing Technology, saw the opportunity to connect its already rich digital customer profiles with offline conversion data. This integration would create a complete view of the customer journey and drive substantial revenue growth through enhanced customer understanding and improved marketing performance.
The Solution
DIRECTV's journey to bridge digital and offline customer experiences began with a fundamental insight: its existing platforms were powerful individually, but transformative when connected. The company embarked on a strategic integration between Invoca and Tealium, its customer data platform, to create a seamless flow of customer insights across all touchpoints.
The transformation started with establishing the infrastructure. DIRECTV configured Invoca to capture session-based data every time a customer called from their website. Each visitor would see a unique tracking phone number, allowing Invoca to collect comprehensive clickstream data—everything from whether the address was serviceable and what products were in their cart, to their customer status, and which marketing campaign brought them to the site.
This gave DIRECTV unprecedented visibility into what customers were doing online before they picked up the phone. Meanwhile, Tealium served as the central nervous system, maintaining detailed customer profiles that included digital behavior patterns across the entire customer lifecycle.
Here's where the magic happened: when Invoca detected a phone conversion, it would send a signal directly to Tealium, enriching those customer profiles with offline conversion data. Tealium would then take this enhanced information and, using the customer's caller ID, push these conversion signals to digital media platforms to enable enhanced conversions and improve AI-powered optimization.
The Results
The integration created a powerful feedback loop. When a customer made a purchase, the conversion data flowed back into the digital marketing ecosystem, teaching algorithms that the original digital touchpoints were successful, even if the final conversion occurred offline. This allowed DIRECTV's marketing platforms to optimize more effectively, understanding the true impact of their digital efforts.
Offline call data fed back into Tealium and activated in digital ad platforms, Meta and Snapchat, driving:
Meta
- 80% more internet streaming conversions
- 2x more call center conversions
- 75% higher paid unique reach
Snapchat
- 281% more internet streaming conversions
- 55% reduction in cost per stream (CPS)
"We built a repeatable model that lets us move fast and show value early. By focusing on education and agility, we were able to scale our use cases across multiple teams."
