Business leads or phone calls?

 

The effectiveness of your inbound calls

How do you measure the effectiveness of any marketing or sales campaign? One of the best ways is by counting the sales leads you receive. How do you know when you get a sales lead from an ad campaign or from a website? You can do this with what we call a tracking phone number.
We place a special phone number on your ad or website. This telephone number routes calls directly to your regular phone but has some special features:

  • It tracks the caller from the caller ID
  • It records the duration of the call
  • It records the telephone conversation (if you want)
  • Provides you with almost real-time access to this information online

Now, with the data from the tracking phone number report, we can somewhat accurately determine the number of sales leads we are getting from a particular activity.

Some people stop at the number of phone calls and categorize them all as ‘leads’. It has been my experience that very few of the phone calls to a website or to a web directory or ad are actually coming from prospects for your services.

What percentage do you ask and how do you determine this?

Actual Results 

These results are from telephone calls to the call tracking number on a directory* or lead website. The client pays to have his ad in a web directory and then can track the phone calls and leads to the telephone number in the ad.

Category

Quantity

Total calls

312

Less duplicates

(68)

Less calls 1 minutes or less

(214)

Net calls

30

Sales calls to Midwest

(15)

Call from existing customers or sales calls

(11)

Potential New Customers

4

These calls took place from February 2014 –June 2015. It is quite amazing how many actual calls were potential customers. Here is another analysis of calls to the tracking phone number on the website. This data was compiled from April – July 2016.

Category

Quantity

Percent

Total Calls

197

100%

Less than 1 minute

(50)

25.3%

Vendors

(16)

8.1%

Existing Customers

(26)

13.2%

Duplicates  

(57)

28.9%

Potential New Customers

48

24.4%

It seems phone calls to the client's website were much more likely to be potential customers than those people searching in a directory site.

* A directory site is like Yellow Pages or Angie's list. I am not revealing which directory site was responsible for the abysmal performance.