“Are you seriously not including phone leads in your monthly marketing reports?”
This is what Mark told me when I confessed how disappointed I felt about our upcoming marketing monthly performance meeting.
Business was thriving but marketing numbers simply didn’t add up.
How could that be? Where we missing something? Where were all these leads coming from?
When it’s time for the monthly marketing performance meeting, how do you feel?
Among gathering data, creating reports, and editing presentations, suspecting that conversions have slipped through the cracks and not being able to prove it, can be a frustrating experience for any marketer.
Who wouldn’t feel outraged when leads are coming in but there is no way to associate them back to a marketing campaign?
Marketers often have tough lead goals to hit and every lead matters.
We created this guide to help you fix leads that “leaked” because they converted over the phone and to help you increase the number of leads you report by more than 30%.
1) Track phone calls from website visitors
You did it! The visitor clicked on one of your campaigns, landed on your website and then..*crickets chirping* 🦗
The session ends, bounce rate goes up and the prospect moved on with his/her life.
Or not? There’s a chance this customer preferred to pick up the phone and connect directly with the sales department.
There are 3 ways to discover if this is true.
- Set up a Trigger via Google Tag Manager to monitor clicks on your phone number – but there’s a catch here – many of these clicks do not become actual calls
- Bribe your sales team with donuts and get them to ask your callers how they found you
- Use a dedicated Call Tracking platform
2) Phone calls driven by Email Newsletters
Newsletters, a great way to introduce a new product or a time-limited discount.
Their formula is simple. Amazing offer – Frictionless CTA
The term friction-less is key here. Customers prefer to convert using their favorite methods (form, online purchase , phone order or even physical purchase)
Eliminating specific methods for the sake of marketing analytics has a huge impact on conversion rate.
When it comes to phone calls, consider using a unique phone number in your newsletters to monitor call conversions for specific offers & campaigns.
5 marketing channels that provenly drive quality phone calls to your business
- Website
- Email Newsletters
- Social Media Organic & Paid Posts
- Google My Business and Company Pages in Social Media
- Google Ads Call Extensions
3) Organic & Paid Social Media offline conversions
In a similar way, Social Media is used both for brand awareness and lead generation.
When a phone number is included either in the body or creative of a social media post, it’s quite likely that some conversions will not be attributed.
Like in newsletters, it is highly advised to use a unique phone number in your social media posts in order to attribute 100% of your phone sales, increasing the ROI and leads generated by the organic channel or paid campaign.
4) Google My Business and Company Pages in Social Media
Do not underestimate the power of listing your phone number on GMB, Facebook, Instagram and pretty much any place you can set up a company page.
During the initial observation period, most marketers are astounded by the amount of phone calls driven by these commonly overlooked sources and listings.
At the end of the day, this is testament to the impact of Local Marketing, SEO and Organic growth.
5) Google Ads Call extensions
When a user with high buying intent searches for your product or service on Google, he or she can do the following:
- Click on the Google Ad
- Call the Google My Business number
- Call the Google Ad extension
In case the user doesn’t interact with the Google Ad but prefers to call the extension, the campaign managed to deliver a new lead. But this won’t be reported in your analytics tool, leading you to think it’s performing poorly.
To counter the above, a unique tracking number should be used as an Ad extension so we can measure those cheeky conversions.
Takeaway
Tracking phone leads & conversions may seem daunting at first. But on a second thought, the process is very similar to using UTMs.
A decade ago, the paperwork needed to apply this would be immense. Not to mention the costs.
Today you can acquire, affordably and quickly, a bunch of unique phone lines to place in your campaigns and track their performance.
FAQ – Phone Leads
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