Great news: sales are up this month!
There’s been a spike in inbound calls from keen customers! You have a ton of brand new leads!
The marketing team are thrilled. Clearly, they’ve been doing something right.
… Trouble is, they have no idea what that “something” is.
Like any good marketing team, they’ve been experimenting with different approaches. Trying out a few different types of advert, changing the wording or the layout. Or maybe they’ve diversified where they’ve been putting their print advertising, foraying into different publications or paying for space in a couple of new locations.
But when customers call in, they have no idea of knowing which of these choices actually hit the jackpot. All they know is that something they did had the desired effect.
Of course, you could tackle this by trying just one approach at a time and comparing the results, but that’s very risky. No one wants to see sales, queries and ultimately profits tumble while they’re testing their ideas, one strand at a time.
Not to mention that you can’t control all the variables from week to week or month to month. What if a certain campaign works best at one time of year, or figures are affected by events beyond your influence, or by the actions of a competitor?
If you are not making a direct comparison between your campaigns, you could draw the wrong conclusions entirely. And, unless you have unlimited cash to blow on experiments that fail to reap ROI, this is far from an ideal place to be.
Luckily, you don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket at a time. You can actually run multiple campaigns (or slightly different versions of the same campaign), side by side – while still tracking the results. A far more effective strategy.
“But how?” I hear you cry.
In fact, it’s easy: introduce “inbound numbering” into your marketing efforts.
Inbound numbering is one of those brilliant ideas that, once you start using it, seems so obvious that you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it. But the secret to getting the most value from any campaign is to publish a different virtual phone number, usually a Freephone 0800 number, on each lead-generating asset, event or location you’re marketing in.
The calls come through to your sales team as usual and the experience is exactly the same from the customer’s perspective. The only difference is that you can monitor which number has been dialled. This tells you instantly whether the lead has come from the poster you put on the side of a bus in Manchester, the brochures you handed out at the convention in London or the ads you took out in a local paper in Inverness.
Being able to visualize the performance of any campaign channel is crucial. This is why we have developed a whole new set of features which allow our customers to associate a phone number to a specific campaign, and view information on how it is performing through the “campaign analytics” screen of their online control panel.
To really measure the success of any marketing campaign, it’s crucial that you look beyond response rates and look at performance stats such as average call duration and total amount of time spent on the call. So we’ve also added the option for users to filter this data in real time, and get a visual representation of the relative success of campaign channels over a specific period of time.
It’s a seamless way to track what’s working, measure ROI and keep honing your marketing strategy, without resorting to assumptions, or by interrupting conversations with potential clients by grilling them on where they spotted your phone number.
What’s more, because you can tell immediately where the caller saw your advert based on the number that pops up when they ring, you can tailor how you handle that call.
Rather than going in blind to a new conversation, your sales team can tell, for example, whether they are likely to be dealing with a person who works in your industry well and wants to get straight to the key techie details, rather than someone who’s less familiar with what you do and needs the concept explained in layman’s terms.
All-in-all, using inbound numbering to track and analyse the source of your leads is a godsend for any company looking to refine their marketing and understand their customer base better.
It’s time to ditch the guesswork and start getting real results!
Stop wasting money on ineffective marketing campaigns, and start optimising the return on your marketing spend. Call our sales team on 0800 3101010 or send us a message via our website and let us know what problems you’re trying to solve. We work with companies of all sizes, from freelancers up to large call centres. We know that one size doesn’t fit all, so we will spend time finding the perfect combination of cloud communication tools to suit your business.
