It’s no secret that phone calls convert much better than web leads and are generally more expensive to buy and more profitable to sell. And while an increasing number of businesses diversify into pay-per-call lead generation and acquisition, very few take advantage of the insights that inbound phone calls can unlock.
Whether you buy or sell phone calls, or you generate organic phone calls for your sales reps, a well-thought-out call tracking and analytics architecture can become your most powerful conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool, even beyond phone calls. Most customers switch marketing channels until you’ve got to speak to them, so you need a comprehensive system with free data flows to account for all of those switches and interpret the collected data correctly.
But I might be getting ahead of myself. First, let’s explore what data you can collect on inbound customer calls and how to do it without overburdening customers with unnecessary questions.
Before You Start: Choosing the Right Pay-Per-Call Numbers
First things first: Before you can run pay-per-call campaigns, even if you’re just buying phone calls, you’d like to get the right pay-per-call numbers so you can understand which calls are coming from which source and, therefore, continuously adjust your campaigns.
There are two types of call tracking numbers you can get:
- Static call tracking numbers – phone numbers that remain the same for every customer, enabling source-level call tracking.
- Dynamic call tracking numbers – phone numbers that change for every customer, enabling customer-level call tracking.
It goes without saying that dynamic numbers are a better choice for digital marketing campaigns because they unlock deeper-level insights, such as which customer behaviors match specific call outcomes. With static call tracking numbers, you only get source-level insights, such as, for example, the differences in performance between callers coming from source A versus source B.
Local, International, Vanity, and Toll-Free Pay-Per-Call Numbers
Whether a phone number is static or dynamic, it can be either local or international in nature. Customers often choose local companies, so consider using local numbers when targeting specific locations, especially if you’re selling on-site services, such as solar panel installation.
Likewise, one of the most effective conversion rate optimization strategies would be to ensure calls are toll-free, so customers don’t have to pay for the call. And if you want to take it one step further, you can use vanity phone numbers, like 844-PHONEXA. Obviously, these numbers increase brand awareness by imprinting your brand’s name or purpose into the caller’s mind. Even for bounced calls, having the caller actually type your company’s name increases the chance they recognize you the next time they come across your ads, content, or products.
What Phone Call Data Can You Track?
Phone calls are generally more trackable than web leads, which gives you more room for improvement. From discovery (like an ad display) to conversion, callers leave multiple bits of information you can collect and categorize to reveal actionable marketing patterns.
Here are some data items you can use for conversion rate optimization:
Note that the mentioned conversion rate optimization parameters are only a drop in the ocean of data you can get with advanced call tracking software. Among other things, you can also track keywords used by a caller and agent to connect those to call outcomes, as well as record the conversation in full to refer back to it whenever needed for reevaluation or compliance purposes.
However, for outbound phone calls, having consent is a must. Before making a marketing call, sending an email, or texting a customer, ensure that you have obtained their consent to receive a specific type of marketing communication from your company. Likewise, you’d like to provide the call leads you have permitted to be contacted by your business.
CRO Strategies for Pay-Per-Call Lead Generation and Acquisition Campaigns
Pre-Qualifying Callers with Advanced Filtering
One of the most obvious yet no less important conversion rate optimization strategies in pay-per-call lead generation is using advanced, fine-tuned filters to pre-quality the callers you generate or acquire.
- As an affiliate, you’d like to know exactly what calls the advertisers on the other end expect, including demographics, psychographics, and firmographics for B2B leads.
- As a buyer, you’d like to establish the right lead and phone call qualification criteria so you can get enough leads that convert into paying customers.
Many affiliate programs limit locations and traffic sources – for example, leads from social media or leads outside the advertiser’s service area might not be accepted – so you have to press the affiliate agreement before unfolding your marketing campaigns.
In-Depth Call Tracking and Multi-Touch Attribution
For advertisers in high-ticket and complex niches, such as insurance, finance, or real estate, it is recommended to reward all affiliates who contributed to a sale, rather than just the last affiliate, as the common last-touch attribution model typically does.
So, depending on the campaigns, you could employ linear, first-touch, or any other complex attribution model to incentivize different types of affiliates to generate leads and phone calls. On your side, you lose next to nothing – the payout is distributed across several affiliates.
AI-Empowered IVR System
Even a standard IVR is a significant step toward optimizing conversion rates. Equipped with an IVR system, you can scale your lead flows almost infinitely while also handling simpler requests on the fly, such as subscription renewals or general inquiries.
However, you can take it a step further by empowering your IVR system with AI call agents. This technology simulates a conversational experience for callers, enabling you to collect even more insights into them and distribute them with greater accuracy.
Unlike traditional IVR systems, which only issue pre-scripted, pre-recorded responses, AI call agents can contextualize conversations based on the data that you’ve collected on the caller and their real-time responses. AI call agents provide industry-specific answers while keeping conversations within reasonable boundaries, which helps accurately qualify callers without overburdening them with repetitive or unnecessary questions.
Advanced Lead Distribution Strategies
To connect the right leads to the right business or sales reps, you need a complex lead distribution flow that factors in dozens of parameters, including the type of call, the caller’s location, purchase history, age, gender, and all other relevant information available about them.
For example, you can design a system that distributes your most profitable callers – those expected to convert with a higher probability or make a high-ticket order – to your best-performing sales agents. Or you might want to prioritize speed of response, immediately connecting callers to the best available rep. There are potentially dozens of parameters to consider, and modern lead distribution systems actually allow you to build customer flows that are that complex.
Predictive Modeling
Last but not least, whether you’re expanding into new markets, audiences, or you’ve just partnered with a new affiliate or advertiser, you can use predictive modeling software to forecast outcomes of your campaigns through computer simulation.
In practice, you can set up the campaign and adjust settings to run dozens or hundreds of simulations until you achieve the desired outcome. Then you can implement the winning strategies with much more confidence and identify strategies that are likely to fall short.
Real-Time Versus Post-Purchase Analytics
In addition to strategic conversion rate optimization, you’d surely like to eliminate low-quality, irrelevant, and fraudulent calls before they reach your sales reps or before you’ve paid for these calls. The good news is that you can do all of that by screening inbound phone calls in real-time.
In practice, there’s software that can automatically screen all inbound leads and phone calls across dozens of parameters, both in real-time and for already acquired customers. For example, within the Phonexa ecosystem, such software includes caller iClear, a tool that incorporates dozens of checks, including the lead’s physical address, email address, ID, phone number, IP address, and even industry-specific checks, such as the lead’s criminal records or bankruptcy records.
- Example: You’re buying solar leads, which you’re going to pass to your on-site solar panel installation team. In this case, you might want to verify the lead’s location and phone number so you can actually reach out to these consumers and confirm their physical address.
However, not always is real-time lead verification superior to post-purchase verification, primarily because the former requires time and, therefore, slows down the lead acquisition process. For example, if you’re buying leads from a competitive market where many other companies are hunting the same leads, or if you’re purchasing leads from reliable sources, you might only verify them post-purchase without pausing the acquisition process.
On a similar note, you don’t necessarily have to collect data on all phone calls and leads at all times, as it incurs additional operational costs. Of course, the more data you collect – especially if you’re doing checks against third-party databases, not just your company’s database – the higher the operational costs, so you might want to randomize your screening.
For example, you can only check 10% or 20% of all inbound phone calls and leads to optimize marketing spend while still retaining control over the acquisition process. Likewise, you might want to cherry-pick the parameters you’d like to check based on your specific campaign, audience, and traffic source. For instance, you might want to check leads across all available parameters from new affiliates while only verifying the most essential data for the leads from verified sources.
How To Synergize Web Lead and Phone Call Campaigns
Since most customer journeys are multi-channel – a single lead may switch from mobile to PC, fill out a form, send you an email, and make a call, among other actions – it’s essential not to miss the switches between touchpoints that inevitably occur for both callers and web leads.
A comprehensive lead management system can solve this for you, unraveling the most complex customer journeys from A to Z while also allowing you to optimize your campaigns across the board. For example, if you’ve spotted that an inbound phone call is on a Do Not Call Registry, you might also want to exclude them from your email list. Or if you’ve spotted that some traffic source provides low-quality phone calls, you might want to inspect web leads coming from them as well.
And so on. With the right lead management software suite in place, the world’s your oyster. You can design any lead generation and acquisition architecture for your business, and you can continuously conduct conversion rate optimization for your web lead and phone call traffic campaigns.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does conversion rate optimization for pay-per-call leads affect web leads?
Since customers frequently switch touchpoints, web leads make calls, whereas callers fill out forms and engage through other marketing channels – insights on inbound phone calls can be used across campaigns, including web lead generation and acquisition.
How can call tracking numbers be used for conversion rate optimization?
First of all, call tracking numbers allow you to collect insights on the level of the traffic source (static call tracking numbers) and individual callers (dynamic call tracking numbers). Secondly, you can use different call tracking numbers for various purposes, such as toll-free numbers to make calls free for your customers, vanity numbers to imprint your brand name or idea into their minds, and local numbers to appeal to callers from target locations.
What is the best conversion rate optimization strategy for pay-per-call campaigns?
While it’s impossible to generalize, you can identify your biggest areas for improvement by tracking and analyzing your current call generation or acquisition campaigns. Then, based on the received data, you can adjust your marketing to increase conversion rates.
For example, if you’ve spotted that some of your agents perform better than others, you can review call recordings and adopt the best call handling practices across the entire sales department. Or you can adjust your call routing strategies to send the most valuable calls to the best-performing agents.
