Phone calls are the lifeblood of customer acquisition for many businesses, even in a digital-first world. While you're investing thousands — perhaps millions — in digital marketing, sales often happen when a lead who engaged with your ads picks up the phone.
That’s why we created the Invoca Call Conversion Industry Benchmarks Report, which analyzes insights our AI captured on over 60 million phone calls and 500 million minutes of conversations. It provides performance benchmarks across nine industries so you can see how effective different digital marketing channels are at driving and converting phone leads.
Whether you're a CMO looking to maximize digital marketing ROI, a sales leader working to improve conversion rates, or a CX professional driving seamless customer experiences, the tactics we’ll cover here will help keep you ahead of the competition.
1. Drive More High-Quality Leads to Call
Driving more leads is the obvious part, but understanding which calls represent sales opportunities is crucial for both marketing efficiency and sales effectiveness. Our data reveals that across all industries, 35% of calls answered by a person are leads, and of those leads, 37% convert on the call.
For marketing leaders, this data is crucial for accurately calculating campaign performance and return on ad spend. For contact center and sales leaders, it provides the baseline for measuring the effectiveness of your agents and location staff at converting phone leads and identifying coaching opportunities.
Refer to the industry benchmarks in the full report here to see how you compare to your peers and identify opportunities to enhance your performance.
If your phone lead rates fall short of industry benchmarks, you may have a marketing efficiency issue. You should investigate if your paid media is the cause — perhaps you are investing in channels and campaigns that aren’t driving the right calls.
Additionally, if your call conversion rates are lower, it may indicate that your contact centers or locations aren’t saying the right things to callers to convert them. Using AI conversation analytics to gain insight into their call handling can help you detect and correct issues that are costing you customers.
The following tactics will help you use this data to optimize your lead and conversion performance.
5 tactics to drive more high-quality phone leads
- Benchmark performance across marketing channels: First, measure phone lead and conversion rates across all marketing channels to understand their impact on your business and what’s driving the best results.
- Shift ad spend to high-performing channels: Once you identify what's working, reallocate marketing budget to the paid channels, campaigns, and keywords driving the most leads and conversions at the best ROAS.
- Pass phone lead and conversion data to ad platforms: Share phone lead and conversion data with your digital advertising platforms to enable more effective automated bidding and audience targeting.
- Route callers based on intent: Utilize call routing that considers digital intent signals to connect leads with agents or locations best suited to convert them, while routing non-lead calls to the corresponding queues.
- Arm agents with caller context: Provide agents with data on the digital marketing source that drove the call and the caller's pre-call website activity, helping agents personalize conversations and improve close rates.
2. Optimize Google Ads to Drive Qualified Phone Leads
Google Ads remains the most important digital advertising channel for driving conversions. Improving phone lead and conversion rates from your Google search ads — even by a small percentage — can have a big impact on business results, bigger than any other paid channel.
If your results from Google Ads paid search are lower than others in your industry, consider the strategies below to improve your efficiency and increase ROAS.
5 Tactics to Improve Google Ads Phone Lead Performance
- Shift ad spend to the keywords driving the most valuable calls: Identify which keywords are generating qualified phone leads and conversions, then reallocate budget from underperforming keywords to these high-value terms. Precision targeting ensures your budget is concentrated where it delivers the greatest return.
- Use phone lead and conversion data to fuel better results from smart bidding and Performance Max: Feed your call data back into Google's automated bidding algorithms to help them optimize for calls that actually convert into appointments or sales. This allows your automation to get smarter with each campaign, continuously improving performance.
- Retarget phone leads that didn't convert: Increase conversions and revenue by creating specific audience segments from callers who are leads but didn't convert. These in-market audiences are often your most valuable — don’t let them go to your competitors.
- Suppress non-lead and converted calls from seeing ads: Exclude callers who have already converted or called for non-sales reasons from your targeting. This can dramatically reduce wasted ad spend and improve campaign efficiency.
- Add your most valuable calls to lookalike campaigns: Create lookalike audiences based on your highest-value callers to find more prospects with similar characteristics and behaviors. This expands your reach to new potential customers who match the profile of your best callers, efficiently scaling your acquisition efforts.
3. Improve Call Answer Rates
Picture this: Your perfectly targeted digital ads have done their job. A potential customer or patient is interested enough to pick up the phone and call you, only to be met with endless ringing or a confusing IVR. Not only have you wasted your precious marketing budget getting that phone to ring, but you've also lost a customer — perhaps forever — to a competitor that answered their call.
Our analysis found that across all industries, 61% of calls to businesses are answered by a person. Your call answer rate isn't just another metric — it's the crucial first hurdle in your customer acquisition process. When calls go unanswered, it creates a devastating ripple effect: marketing ROI plummets, customer frustration spikes, and revenue opportunities vanish.
Review the industry benchmarks below, and if your answer rates are significantly lower, it indicates a missed opportunity stemming from process or staffing inefficiencies in the contact center or business locations that answer the calls.
5 tactics to improve call answer rates
Low answer rates can signal deeper issues like understaffing, confusing IVR systems, poor call routing, or misalignment between marketing and sales teams.
If your business falls significantly below your industry benchmark, it indicates an opportunity to capture additional revenue by improving call handling and optimizing marketing. You can consider the following strategies to improve your call answer rates.
- Monitor how your business answers calls: First, identify which contact centers or business locations are struggling to answer calls. Then you can drill down into the specific days and times when missed calls occur to determine the cause. Are missed calls primarily occurring when calls are closed, or is there an issue with answering calls during business hours?
- Use missed call data to optimize staffing: If missed calls occur during business hours, compare missed call rates to overall call volume for those days and times to identify times when you may be understaffed and adjust resources accordingly.
- Pause paid media ads during closed hours: If your business cannot assist callers when closed, consider pausing paid advertising that drives high call volumes during non-business hours.
- Simplify your IVR experience: Complex IVRs with excessive promotional messages or overly complex choices can frustrate callers and increase abandonment rates. Streamline your IVR to connect callers with assistance faster, especially if they’re looking to buy. Better yet, route high-intent callers directly to agents to skip the IVR.
- Implement ring group routing: Reduce missed calls by routing high-intent callers to a list of phone numbers sequentially, simultaneously, or via round-robin until someone answers.
4. Use Automated AI SMS Messaging to Progress and Convert Leads 24/7
Nearly 80% of customers buy from the first company to respond, and after one hour, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80%. Your business locations and call centers may not be open 24/7, and hold times can be long during peak hours. Consumers are increasingly impatient, though, so you need to use every channel available to convert more leads into customers.
By using automated, AI-powered SMS like Invoca’s AI Messaging Agent, you can engage buyers immediately via SMS, so your brand is always first to the conversation and first to the sale. You can respond to every buyer the moment they reach out, whether that’s after a call, an abandoned form fill, a visit to a web or landing page, or an ad click.
Invoca’s AI Messaging Agent enables you to convert leads faster by engaging high-intent buyers the instant they reach out. And when leads stall — whether after a missed call, an abandoned form, or a long hold time — AI Messaging Agent keeps the conversion path open. It uses in-depth knowledge of your business from call transcripts, digital journey data, and past consumer interactions to ensure every exchange is accurate, personalized, and on-brand. Learn more about how our AI Messaging Agent works here.
5. Improve Call Experiences to Convert More Leads
When it comes to converting leads into customers, it's not just about answering the call—it's about how effectively your contact center agents and location staff engage with prospects, address their needs, and guide them toward a successful outcome.
Call handling quality directly impacts both immediate conversions and long-term customer relationships. In fact, Invoca research shows that 76% of consumers will stop doing business with a brand after just one bad experience, making every conversation a critical moment of truth for your business.
Our analysis evaluated how often businesses are correctly handling phone leads. It examined eight key call handling metrics to identify the behaviors they excel in, the outcomes of calls, and how they rated the performance of the agent or location staff.
See the full report to see how your performance compares to others in your industry.
5 tactics to improve call handling performance
If your business's metrics are lower than industry benchmarks — or if you lack this level of insight into how your contact centers or locations are handling phone leads — follow the tactics below to drive improvements.
- Score call handling using AI: Implement AI-powered call scoring to analyze 100% of calls and objectively measure agent performance against key metrics.
- Refine talk tracks based on what works: Use call-scoring data to correlate agent behavior with call outcomes and determine which strategies really work, so you can refine your talk tracks accordingly.
- Identify specific calls for review: Pinpoint specific conversations where agents or location staff didn't meet standards so you can investigate.
- Provide targeted coaching to agents: Pinpoint specific conversations where agents or location staff didn't meet your standards and provide targeted coaching. Show them specific moments in calls to illustrate what they could have done differently to improve close rates.
- Monitor customer experience issues: Track metrics such as call transfer rates, hold times, and customer sentiment to identify systemic issues that affect conversion rates.
Learn more about how you can improve call experiences with Invoca’s AI Quality Management here.
Get the Invoca Call Conversion Industry Benchmarks Report here to see how your performance stacks up to others in your industry and to get more actionable advice to stay ahead of the pack.
