I would like to say that this new product came from some extensive brain-storming completed by the team, incorporating the latest in mind-melding techniques. But I would be lying. It all started with a customer and a problem.
This customer owned a lead generation website that did an above-average job of taking paid and organic search traffic and converting it into good quality sales leads. Each month they would review their traffic and lead count to match up how their conversion rate was going. And if it needed improving – think every month there is room for improvement – site changes would be tested to edge this rate further upwards. The whole process lived and breathed on hard facts,all underpinned with a strong desire to grow faster.
Things were going well. But still their business needed more leads to achieve the growth they had planned. So my attention turned to their inbound call volumes. Yes, their website had a phone number but it was their general office number, which they used for all their other marketing too. Now we knew that some prospects called using this form while staring at the website – but we didn’t know how many took this option and the effectiveness of turning this traffic into leads.In one meeting I made a strong suggestion that this phone traffic needed tracking with as much rigor as was being used for web tracking. Fortunately, they had a spare number they could use and so we swapped out the website number with this just to see what turned up.
Needless to say, the fact that this whole train of events spawned a new product points to what they found being quite a revelation. For instance, the site was generating as much phone traffic as form submission leads. And let me remind you that the online lead count was at the top end. Everyone was surprised with this one.
But then when they ran the numbers through, it was the conversion rate of this inbound call traffic into quotes by their call centre that was the real issue. The numbers were startling. It was running at under a quarter of the online conversion rate. So that was the real target for achieving fast growth.
All they needed to do was double the effectiveness of how they handled inbound calls to bring it up to about half of the online conversion rate and they would more than double the total number of quotes the company did – without spending any more in marketing cost.
Now, not everyone has a spare telephone number hanging around waiting to run a test like this. Which is why we are launching this new product.
It’s a simple concept. We supply you with a phone number (both regional and 0800 numbers are supported) that sits on your website or perhaps in your Google Ad. Anyone who calls that number is routed directly to where you want them to go. It’s a seamless process for the caller. Each month you receive a tracking report from Permission that shows you how many people used that number, the length of the call, etc. Plus, with some extra magic, we can integrate this into your Google Analytics account so you can see the calls coming off your website as individual events.
And if you want you can turn on call recording and have access to recordings of all the calls that come your way. There’s a very nominal monthly line rental fee, a small minimum term, and even smaller costs per minute for the calls to be routed where you want them. Tracking and measurement are a snip to do for your online marketing activities. Now you can put the same “blow torch” of accountability to your inbound call work to see how you fare in this area. Contact us today on sales@permision.co.nz if this makes sense for your business.