It surprises many people that small and mid-sized businesses make up a majority of employer firms in the United States (99.7% to be exact). The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) defines these small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) as enterprises having fewer than 500 employees. However, the average small to mid-sized business has a sales team of less than five employees. The obvious top strategic priority for many companies of this size is to reduce cost without compromising sales growth.
To propel the sales funnel forward, fast-paced, growth-oriented businesses need to improve the effectiveness of their team and spend to create more efficient ROI. To achieve this, greater insight into the success of marketing efforts needs to be a top priority. While the advent of the Internet diverted many marketers’ attention to social interactions, click-throughs and online conversions, SMBs today still continue to rely on telephone calls to drive their business. The increasing use of mobile devices, where making a call is as easy as tapping a button, is reviving the importance of phone calls. According to BIA/Kelsey, mobile search is estimated to generate 73 billion calls to businesses in 2018. Smart sales and marketing managers should take advantage of this uptick in mobile to get in front of their customers with the proper messaging and actions to drive leads.
One of the best ways for SMBs to gain actionable insight and visibility into their inbound calls is through effective tracking and call analytics. Here are some call analytics best practices that will empower your sales team and ultimately increase your ROI:
Design with mobile in mind
With the influx of consumer mobile browsing leading to a spike in inbound call volume, call tracking has become a crucial element of the savvy digital marketer’s strategy. Optimizing your mobile website is a crucial step not only toward call tracking implementation, but also reaching potential mobile customers.
Embrace the click-to-call
One of the best ways to determine which sources are driving your calls is by assigning a unique trackable phone number to each marketing campaign (i.e. a click-to-call CTA). Keyword-level tracking also uses a unique phone number for each keyword source within a search, allowing businesses to drill down to the individual search keyword level and link calls to specific Web visitors and their actions on the site. This is an essential component for businesses that are looking to expand their marketing channels across digital mediums.
Monitor for sales effectiveness
Call recording provides the ability to train salespeople with what to do and not to do on the phone with potential customers. SMBs can improve sales and assess the quality of their phone leads by using call recordings to flag strong and weak calls for review, employee training opportunity and qualified vs. unqualified leads.
Set conversion requirements
SMBs can set conversion requirements for their sales teams, resulting in better-qualified leads and greater marketing/sales alignment. Small businesses can provide valuable feedback to their sales reps in order to increase their effectiveness.
Merge your CRM and analytics platforms
Businesses can gain a holistic view of their advertising spend when they view their data in conjunction with online analytics. This visibility lets them evaluate what is working and eliminate what isn’t, significantly lowering cost per lead, converting calls into qualified leads and increasing the ROI of their marketing efforts.
By having greater insight into call analytics, SMBs can ultimately improve customer experience and retention while allowing for data-driven marketing and better lead generation decisions. SMBs can help close the ROI loop without breaking the bank and start focusing on the mobile marketing campaigns that can take advantage of inbound call growth – and stop wasting money on the ones that don’t.
Lance Weatherby is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at CallRail. He has a passion for building customer-focused Internet companies and a proven record of achievement.
