Why You Should Be Tracking Calls During the Holidays
Inbound calls to businesses have been on the rise for quite some time now. Calls driven by ad campaigns have recorded a growth of 110% since 2014 in the US. This year, the number of inbound calls to businesses is expected to surpass 162 billion.
A majority of these calls can be attributed to the holiday seasons, when customers frantically call businesses for information. To give you an idea, Americans spent $717.5 billion on Black Friday alone last year.
All of those calls you get during the holidays are extremely high converting calls. Seems pretty important to track and attribute those calls, right?
If you’re like most marketers, you may not track calls during the holidays. But doing so can give you a strong insight into customer behavior and campaign performance. You can get your hands on valuable data that you can use to refine and enhance your future marketing campaigns.
Today, we’ll explore what makes call tracking so crucial during the holidays.
Call Tracking for Customer Insight
Businesses need to develop a deep understanding of what drives their customers. The huge number of calls during holidays gives you the opportunity to discover shopper intent. You can find out exactly at which point shoppers decide to call you. This will give you a clear picture of your customers’ journey.
Marketers can also discover trends by assessing call analytics and taking advantage of this data at the right time. Call tracking solutions like CallGear also let you record calls for even more in-depth conversation insights. You can also develop call transcripts and search them by keywords and phrases.
These insights enable you to improve all customer touchpoints and optimize your campaigns.
Score More Qualified Leads from Calls During the Holidays
“Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn’t take a break from you.” – Douglas Coupland
People who call you during the holidays are obviously hot leads. You need to convert them before the steak turns cold! In order to do so, you have to quickly qualify these leads from the huge volume of calls.
With call tracking, it becomes a breeze to qualify call leads. You can just take analyze the call duration and value each lead. If a call lasted for less than 60 seconds, you can ignore it! But if the call duration is 5, 10, 20 or 30 minutes, you can assume it’s qualified.
Calls that last more than an hour are an amazing sign!
You can also qualify leads by listening to call recordings as discussed above.
Measure Campaigns with Call Tracking
You must be running some special campaigns for the holidays to cash in on some extra customers and sales. These advertisements can be on billboards, magazines, website pages, social media, or anywhere else both online or offline. You need to measure how they’re performing. If you don’t, you can’t get a clear picture of your marketing ROI on increased spending during the holidays.
Call tracking helps you pinpoint what makes your customers call, and what makes them call your competitors instead. You can use dynamic numbers for each campaign and find the most effective ones. CallGear also lets you track the exact keywords that result in a call.
Additionally, you can also A/B test different platforms, media, languages and more. With a clear picture of your marketing ROI, you can create an effective budget for the next season.
Create Perfect Advertisements with Holiday Call Data
We just discussed how we can measure campaign performance using call tracking. The data that you generate can contribute towards making advertisements that work for your audience. You can also use the customer insights you discovered using call tracking to refine your messages for a better appeal.
Apart from providing valuable data, call tracking also allows you to:
- Test various copies of an ad by using dynamic numbers for each copy
- Measure and refine the performance of landing pages
- Generate insight about customers in a specific geographical location
- Track seasonal keywords
- Optimize the timing of ads
In short, call tracking will help you create better ads for the holiday season.
Call Tracking to Assess Employee Performance on Holiday Calls
Your call agents or sales reps need to approach customers in a different way to push for holiday sales. The same pitch you use every day of the year will not cut it. Chances are, you train or prepare employees beforehand to take a different approach during the holidays.
Call tracking allows you to check if your employees are able to convert customers during holiday sales. You can listen to call recordings to assess the performance of each agent. You can then zero in on the employees who are not doing well and take remedial measures.
You can also use an automated call scoring feature to analyze calls without having to listen to full recordings. The software will do the job for you.
Call Tracking for Optimizing Holiday Business Timing
Call tracking reveals a lot of things about your customers, including when they call you. By taking a look at call details by the exact hour and minute, you can tell when you are getting the most calls. These insights let you plan for peak business hours and allocate resources accordingly.
You can also have your employees work mostly during peak hours so that they stay free to enjoy the holidays during the rest of the day.
The timing of these calls also helps you discover when people are searching for you or interacting with your ads. You can then use the information to create effective scheduling strategies for maximum reach.
Final Thoughts: Don’t Let the Holidays Pass without Call Tracking
When the holidays are around the corner, make sure to set up and activate call tracking for your business. This timesaving tool provides deep visibility into a traditionally opaque channel, and generates crucial data for your business. The lessons you learn this year with call tracking will bear fruit during the next holiday season, whether it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Christmastime.
As more shoppers use smartphones when making purchases, call tracking will become more and more imperative for the holidays. Are you ready to harness the power of call tracking for the holidays?