Call Tracking: Why Should All Small Businesses Use It?

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A stellar marketing strategy enables you to attract customers and boost brand awareness. But, it is vital to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns to ensure they are profitable. And, to get a complete picture of the value marketers bring to your business, you need to measure both online and offline conversions.

And with more than 60% of customers connecting with small businesses on the phone, you cannot avoid call tracking.

Call tracking refers to the strategy in which you assign a unique number to each marketing campaign so that you can track the number of leads, sales, and volume coming from each campaign. However, you need not have multiple telephone lines with an eSIM. All the incoming calls are redirected to your business phone number.

Today I’m going to mention the key benefits of call tracking and why every small business should use it. Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

  1. Helps Determine Your True Return on Investment
  2. Provides Insights Into Your Sales Processes
  3. Helps You Optimize Advertising Strategies
  4. Empowers You to Improve Customer Service Using Call Recording
  5. Provides In-Depth Caller Information
  6. Recover Lost Leads

1. Helps Determine Your True Return on Investment

Let’s suppose you are a small business owner with a $1,000 monthly marketing budget. Each month, you divide your $1,000 between different marketing channels: SEO, social media, email marketing, content marketing, and print advertisements.

You receive 20 phone calls, out of which eight become customers. Now the question is, where did these customers come from? Which channel brought the maximum leads? How do you know if a channel is effective or needs optimization?

That’s where call tracking can help. Call tracking software allows you to determine if you are making money, losing money, or breaking even in all your marketing channels. One of the top software you can try out is Phonexa.

For example, Fannit, a Washington-based marketing agency, had a problem: one of their clients was worried that they could not generate enough leads. They thought Fannit’s online marketing strategy was underperforming as they were receiving more phone calls than form submissions.

Fannit used call tracking to assign unique phone numbers to each of their campaigns. This helped them measure the number of calls their campaigns were generating and prove their ROI.

They also realized that the actual problem was with the sales team. The client’s employees weren’t asking the right questions. As a result, the client made changes to its sales processes and generated $250,000 additional annual revenue.

Here is how you can too determine your return on investment using call tracking:

  • Assign a unique phone number to your campaigns (PPC, email, SMS campaigns, etc.).
  • Analyze the number of phones coming from them.
  • Check the conversion rates from each campaign.
  • Determine the average order value and ROI from each campaign.
  • Compare it with the money spent on the campaign.

You can calculate your ROI using this formula:

ROI = ((Amount Earned - Amount Spent)/Amount Spent) * 100  

Return on Investment Formula

Tip: A good marketing ROI ratio is 5:1. If yours is less than that, it’s time to optimize the campaigns.

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2. Provides Insights Into Your Sales Processes

Sales Processes Insights
As a business owner, you cannot handle all the customer interactions. By tracking and recording the incoming messages, you can get a complete understanding of your customers’ experience when calling your company. This also helps you understand why you are losing leads (just like Fannit’s client did).

A call analytics tool provides you insights into:

  • When throughout the week people reach out to you
  • When throughout the day people call you
  • How your team members handle your prospects
  • Who answers the phone
  • If your representatives are knowledgeable or require training
  • If your leads convert into appointments (and how often)
  • What was the caller’s intent (looking for information, interested in buying the product, etc.)

By having a better understanding of your company’s customer service, you will be better able to tailor your sales processes, improve your sales copy, train your agents, and better accommodate staffing needs (to manage increased volumes during peak hours).

Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose:

  • You receive maximum calls on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
  • Between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.
  • Out of 100 calls, 10 convert into customers, 15 schedule an appointment, and 75 never convert.

You can hire temporary salespeople to manage customers on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.

Then, listen to recordings to understand the prospect’s intent and determine why 75 callers never convert. These recordings will also enable you to identify if your agent was able to answer your prospects’ questions efficiently.

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3. Helps You Optimize Advertising Strategies

When you know what strategies are working, you can increase your marketing budget while eliminating the inefficient ones. Call tracking enables you to track each campaign’s ROI so you can determine which ones to continue and which ones to stop.

With advanced call tracking, you will be able to determine which keywords generate the most leads (and sales). You can then use these insights to optimize your campaigns further and improve your ROI.

How Keyword-Level Tracking Works

For instance, Grand Lucayan, a luxury hotel in the Bahamas, used a combination of TV, print, and online ads to attract customers from the eastern US seaboard. They spent most of their marketing budget on Atlanta and North Carolina.

_Note: _It is worth mentioning that maximum flights in the Bahamas come from Atlanta.

However, when they implemented call tracking, they noticed that most of the phones come from Florida and the northeast United States, instead of areas where they advertised the most. Grand Lucayan then adjusted its strategy to target the best-performing areas (in the zip code level). As a result, their phone conversion rates went up by 157%.

Here is how you can optimize advertising strategies using call tracking:

  • Add different numbers to each of your AdWords campaigns.
  • Enable call tracking to track the leads coming from them.
  • Check which ads perform better than others.
  • Optimize the ones that aren’t performing well (try changing the copy and use keywords from high-performing ads).

Repeat the process. If you still don’t see any improvements in the ROI, it’s recommended to stop those ads and focus on the ones that generate better results.

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4. Empowers You to Improve Customer Service Using Call Recording

Improve Customer Service Using Call Recording

As mentioned above, call tracking software helps you understand how your agents interact with customers. You can then use these insights to refine your sales processes and increase the conversion rate.

With call recordings and transcripts, you can learn how your agents pitch your product or services, how they handle questions, and how well your team meets the caller’s needs.

Additionally, recordings are a great way to learn what products or services prospects like or dislike. You can then use these insights to create hyper-personalized campaigns (retargeting ads, discounts, exclusive access, etc.) to encourage prospects to use your product.

For example, if you offer digital marketing services, and a prospect is interested in an SEO campaign while another wants you to handle their email campaigns. You can then create two ads to target both prospects. You can even offer a free trial to demonstrate how effectively you can manage their marketing campaigns.


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5. Provides In-Depth Caller Information

In-Depth Caller Information

Call tracking offers more information than just caller ID. Before your multichannel call center agent picks the phone, he or she will have caller details, including:

  • Caller’s first and last name
  • Phone number
  • The geographic location of the caller
  • Which campaign they are calling from (so your agent knows which product the customer is interested in)
  • Are they a repeat or first-time caller?

Modern call tracking software even record:

  • The length of the call
  • The quality of the call
  • The caller’s purchase history
  • Reason for the call

You can then use these insights to enhance customer service and better meet the caller’s needs.

For example, you can create retargeting ads to reach customers who have shown interest in specific products to attract and convert them. Or you can create SMS campaigns to reach prospects directly.

You can also use the quality of the call to determine how good (or bad) the customer experience was and create offers for them accordingly. For instance, if the experience was good, you can create campaigns that highlight the benefits of your product to encourage them to take action. However, if it was not good, you can offer exclusive discounts (as a token of sorry) directly via SMS (as you now have their numbers).

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6. Recover Lost Leads

How to follow up

Not every caller will convert into a customer the first time. However, this does not mean that they are not interested in your products or services (remember, they called you first). This is why it is vital to follow up. Sadly, 44% of salespeople give up just after one attempt.

With call tracking, you can record what product or service the customer was initially interested in, analyze the recordings to understand their concerns and create strategies to address their anxieties better. For instance, you can create retargeting ads or send compelling emails that answer their queries.

For example, James Crawford Law used call tracking with a CRM (HubSpot) to retain 61% more clients. When they imported their contacts from their old CRM to HubSpot, they noticed 47% of the contacts were still considered open. Some of those open leads had their last consultation 18 months ago.

The law firm then created a month-long drip campaign, including SMS and email. HubSpot’s if/then logic workflow empowered them to identify active leads. Within two months of tracking and HubSpot automation, JC Law’s monthly new retained cases increased by as much as 61%. The following month (July) was even better. The retention rate went up by 83%.


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Wrapping Up

Call tracking is a must-have for all small businesses. It helps you measure marketing activities, calculate ROI, and improve customer service, among other things. Here’s a quick recap of the eight benefits of call tracking for small businesses:

  1. Helps Determine Your True Return on Investment
  2. Provides Insights Into Your Sales Processes
  3. Helps You Optimize Advertising Strategies
  4. Empowers You to Improve Customer Service Using Call Recording
  5. Provides In-Depth Caller Information
  6. Recover Lost Leads

Keep using call tracking to get the most out of your investment and convert more leads.


Written by our guest writer Rohit Rajpal

With more than two years of experience in writing, Rohit Rajpal has been helping brands improve their online presence with informative and engaging content. When he is not writing, he’s busy reading about digital marketing and copywriting. On the other side, he runs his own blog named Learn SEO Pro.

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