According to a study by BrightLocal, 60% of people prefer to contact a small business by phone. So the telephone is (still) a real communication channel for your business. Yet it is probably the least measured & exploited channel.
Call tracking is an important lever to generate more leads from your cold calling and to strengthen your customer knowledge from incoming calls. In this article, we will first explain how call tracking works and what it can do for you. If you are already familiar with the subject, don’t hesitate to skip to the second part (criteria for a good solution, and examples of solutions).
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Call tracking: definition & principle
The people who call your company are not only customers and prospects – they are also a source of information that you need to be able to exploit in order to strengthen your customer knowledge and thus refine your marketing messages. Call tracking allows you to extract data from these interactions.
The primary objective of call tracking is to identify how the person on the other end of the phone came to know about your company and decided to call you. By assigning and displaying a unique phone number according to source, channel, campaign or period, the tracking software allows you to understand what motivated the phone call. The principle is actually quite simple: each visitor will have a different phone number on their screen, so that if they dial the number displayed, they can be identified.
Call tracking can also allow you to improve your customer knowledge on digital channels. For example, some customers prefer the openness of a phone call: if a prospect visits your website and decides to call, the number they find on your site can tell you when they visited and which pages they consulted.
But call tracking is not just a marketing tool. The data collected should be used to analyse trends and allocate calls to strategic initiatives throughout your organisation, from marketing to sales to customer service.
The advantages of call tracking
Call tracking offers short and long-term benefits that fit perfectly into your overall marketing and sales objectives. These benefits include the following:
- Optimise the ROI of your marketing budget: Online and offline campaigns are costly. To help your marketing teams measure the ROI of the campaigns they implement, call tracking identifies the origin of incoming calls and helps you adjust your strategy if necessary.
- Optimised campaigns: Call tracking generates robust data from which you can determine which marketing campaigns are working or struggling, as well as which keywords and messages are resonating with prospects. From there, campaigns can be modified to produce the best results.
- Greater reach: Not all of your potential customers are online, and many simply prefer to talk to a real person. Call tracking gives you the confidence you need to design campaigns to reach these prospects and measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
- Better lead tracking: Call tracking allows you to collect information at all stages of your sales funnel. You can then better tailor your prospecting efforts based on how the prospect is progressing through the buying journey and what they are telling you during their phone interactions with you.
What makes a good call tracking solution?
Here are the main elements to take into account when deploying a call tracking solution in your company:
Easy to implement and configure
Most of your non-digital marketing campaigns are scheduled well in advance and the contact phone numbers need to be ready before the final creative is approved. So your call tracking platform – and the adoption of the solution within your teams – must be ready too.
In addition to a stress-free installation, your call tracking platform must integrate with your existing marketing and sales software and CRM. Being able to integrate call analysis data into your marketing automation tools is an important asset for your marketing teams.
Dynamic number insertion
One of the basic features of call tracking is the ability to generate unique phone numbers for any campaign you launch. Dynamic Number Insertion(DNI) applies this principle to your website itself. A person visits your site and, depending on how they got there, a specific phone number is displayed so that if and when they call, you know what initially led them to your site.
For example, if a prospect clicks on a Google ad, the DNI can be configured to display a phone number – anywhere on your site – only to people who click on your PPC campaigns. So the DNI can be configured as precisely as you like to generate the most robust data possible.
Also, for inbound calls, you will have a better idea of the type of prospect contacting you. Someone arriving via a link you included in the description of an Instagram video may have different buying goals to someone who clicked on a Facebook post – with DNI, you’ll know this even before you answer the call.
Conversational intelligence
Getting people to call your business is a major challenge in your marketing strategy. What you say to these people when they call you should be the easy part – but it is far more complex than many businesses realise. It is also important to review what has been said.
Conversational intelligence offers a way to take your call tracking to the next level by transcribing and analysing the interaction between the caller and your company.
This feature can identify keywords that are likely to lead to conversions and sales. Conversational intelligence can also help you determine the potential of a prospect, so it is ultimately a lead qualification tool.
Call recording
Call recording provides another means of examining and analysing conversations from certain numbers, or outgoing calls. The use of this data is subject to relatively strict regulations, but the software you choose will help you comply. For example, the ability to set up a pre-call announcement stating that the call “may be monitored for quality reasons”.
Want to know more about cold calling? Discover our resources on the subject:
- 20 tips for successful cold calling
- When should you focus your prospecting calls?
- Sales script: the best examples
The best call tracking solutions
In this second part we present only the solutions that work in France. The tools below take care of the attribution of French-speaking telephone numbers. For international operations, you can rely on G2Crowd’s benchmark on the subject.
WannaSpeak
WannaSpeak is a complete French call tracking software whose affordable prices are particularly suitable for SMEs.
WannaSpeak also offers call recording and routing, caller ID, voice recognition / IVR and centralized keyword tracking. In addition to allowing you to precisely determine the source of your calls, this call tracking tool offers very interesting “Click to Call” and “Click to Chat” features:
- Click to Call: Free and immediate call back service.
- Click to chat: Improve your conversion by allowing your prospects to ask you questions live on your site.
CallTracker.io
Calltracker.io is distinguished by a very intuitive Analytics tool that allows you to quickly and easily analyse the data from your calls. We find the click to call functionality which will increase the engagement of your customers and prospects: they can be called back in one click. Finally, the solution records calls for you in order to strengthen the quality of your customer relationship and manages your answering machine as well as missed calls.
As far as prices are concerned, here is how Calltracker.io is positioned:
- Each call forwarding costs € 0.015 / minute to a fixed line and € 0.065 / minute to a mobile.
- You also pay €1 per month for each tracking number you use.
Dexem
Dexem is a call tracking tool developed in Brittany that offers more advanced features:
- Identify your most effective acquisition channels by dynamically displaying tracking numbers on your site based on traffic source.
- Determine which keywords your prospects are most interested in (when they call you) in order to refine your AdWords campaigns.
- Dexem integrates very well with the different digital tools for analysing your audience, such as Google Analytics, to find out in detail the behaviour of your different types of customers.
These advanced features imply a slightly higher learning curve, so the tool is more suitable for agencies that deploy the solution to their clients via experienced consultants.
CallTrackingMetrics
An American tool but which can be used in France, CallTrackingMetrics offers other options which might interest you such as :
- Follow-up of sms
- Further tracking of calls from mobile phones: this is becoming a major issue as you can imagine.
- The call tracking tool is integrated into a complete call centre and call management solution.
On pricing, CallTrackingMetrics offers :
- A $36/month package for basic call tracking functionality.
- A $83/month plan for advanced analytics and integration with Facebook and Hubspot.
- The Contact Center package at $249/month, which integrates with Salesforce and allows you to manage all your call-related issues.
Although the rise of digital tools has given rise to many new channels of interaction between brands and their customers, the telephone remains an important lever that you should not neglect, both in your prospecting and for your customer service. It is therefore essential that you have the right tool to make the most of the possibilities of this communication channel. Don’t hesitate to share with us the call tracking software you use in the comments if we haven’t mentioned it!
