Lead conversion data — such as traffic source, keyword searched, web page visits, conversion type and past interactions — can help marketers understand what channels and activities motivate prospects to take action, and also help sales professionals better prioritize and customize sales pitches.
Platforms like HubSpot and Google Analytics, make it easy to track online conversion data (i.e. contact form completions), but what about when a lead picks up the phone and calls? To capture these offline conversions, marketers need call tracking.
Following are three ways call tracking can help to move leads through the sales funnel.
For more details about how to integrate call tracking with your online marketing and measurement tools, read our recent guest post on Hubspot “3 Ways to Track Offline Lead Conversions with Call Tracking.”
1. Lead Generation
To fill the top of the sales funnel with quality prospects, you need to continuously analyze how leads find you and what they are interested in. Armed with this information, you can evolve campaigns to focus more resources and budgets on those activities proven to generate lead conversions.
Call tracking can support this effort by accurately recording offline conversions (i.e. phone calls) and associating each with a specific marketing initiative.
As a visitor arrives to your website or landing page, source data, such as referring site (i.e. search engine, business directory) and keyword query is captured, and he or she is shown a unique tracking number. As soon as a call is placed to this number, the source information and conversion are logged.
From here, this data can be combined with online conversion data to:
- Improve website optimization and content marketing efforts by targeting the keywords that have proven to generate leads — whether they come from online or off.
- Enhance PPC campaigns by associating conversions with campaigns, ad groups, ads and keyword bids, and then adjusting ads and budgets based on ROI.
- Adjust calls to action and messaging by reviewing what seems to resonate with target audiences, and apply this knowledge to other initiatives.
2. Lead Nurturing
After a person has converted into a lead, your job as a marketer is to activate a nurturing campaign that guides them further down the sales funnel. To do this, you need to share useful resources, product details and/or promotions that keep prospects engaged and interested, and your business top of mind.
Call tracking can enhance lead-nurturing campaigns by tracking offline conversions that take place after a prospect has already converted into a lead. For example:
- Content Downloads — Integrate a unique tracking number into eBooks, reports, whitepapers and other content downloads. All calls that come in as a result will be associated with the proper content piece and tracked as a requalified lead.
- Online Webinars — Similarly, by including a tracking number in webinar call-to-action slides, you can associate resulting calls with the webinar that prompted them.
- Lead Nurturing Campaigns — By including tracking numbers in lead nurturing emails and any corresponding landing pages you can associate calls with these efforts.
Using this data, and similar data pulled from online conversions, you can update your content and lead-nurturing campaigns to include calls to action, headlines, promotions and messaging that have proven to re-engage leads, and identify and update the areas that need work.
3. Sales Conversions
To effectively close leads, your sales professionals need to be able to identify a prospect’s need and customize a sales pitch to prove how your product/service can satisfy it. Conversion data collected during the lead-generation and lead-nurturing phases can help simplify this process.
With call tracking, you can capture useful background information for all offline conversions, including traffic source (i.e. referring site, keyword searched, PPC campaign, drip campaign email, content download), last web page visited prior to calling and caller I.D. In addition, you can record incoming calls so that sales professionals can listen to, and get caught up on, what was previously discussed.
By then feeding this information into a CRM, and combining with online conversion data, you can create a comprehensive lead profile, which sales professionals can use to:
- Prioritize follow-up communications.
- Learn more about a lead’s needs or topics of interest.
- Tailor sales pitches.
- Engage the prospect.
Do you use a call tracking? If so, how has it improved your inbound marketing campaign performance?
Tags: Call Tracking, phone call tracking, phone call tracking for lead generation
