Targeted Calls: How To Find A Needle In A Haystack

COO at Ringostat, Julia Holovko, prepared an overview of what are considered to be targeted calls in marketing, how to determine them wisely and what to do in order to eliminate the number of untargeted calls.

72% of phone calls driven by mobile search advertising last longer than 30 seconds and have an average duration of 6 minutes. How to understand which of them are really important?

The concept of KPI is very meaningful for business and evolves with the emergence of new targets. Before implementation of call tracking the most important performance indicators were web traffic volume, number of clicks and keyword position. Now it’s possible to analyze the following indexes:

• The number of customer calls received by your customer service.
• The number of targeted calls – received phone calls lasting longer than specified and made from a unique telephone number within a sales cycle.
• Call conversion rate – the percent of leads resulted in purchase transactions.

A targeted call is considered to be the one lasting more than 50 seconds. A Google research showed that the ideal phone call duration including wait time far exceeds one minute. Check out the screenshot below.

The research also found that among the possible reasons of the calls there were only two related directly to the issue of purchase of goods or services, while the rest were caused by lack of information on companies’ websites.

Moreover, there are other types of calls disguised as targeted, but not bringing the desired result – a purchase:

• The most frequent one is a wrong number. Very often until it’s detected the client tells all the reasons of calling and this can take some time.
• Offering services. A polite call agent can spend a lot of time explaining that the firm doesn’t need to buy contextual advertising, or, for example, already has a supplier of drinking water to the office.
• Customer is not satisfied with the product quality. For example, a company selling real estate brakes the deadline of the project.

Below are three approaches that we at Ringostat advice our clients to consider to qualify as targeted calls

1. The first and easiest method is recording conversations. Indeed, the manager can listen to the phone conversations and make conclusions about their effectiveness. But listening to all calls is physically impossible, so the choice for the analysis of some specific conversations can affect the accuracy of the findings.
2. Another method is receiving call agents’ feedback. Each agent can include a recently finished call to a particular category, and it will be possible to get a general summary of the effectiveness of the call center and see the percentage of useful phone calls.
3. But the most reasonable solution is using data from a CRM system. One of the most important indicators of efficiency is sales rate. CRM systems collect data about clients, and the history of purchases is not an exception.

In order to kill two birds with one stone, companies can use call tracking and benefit from its integration with CRM systems. Thus, the calls coming through tracking numbers automatically appear in CRM as leads or activities.

As a result, a possibility to have all the important data such as statistics on key words, client’s journey on company’s website, call duration, purchase history and telephone conversations recordings in one place. It’s also possible to implement a handy telephony directly from CRM, because almost all of the call tracking systems are virtual PBX of full value.

Furthermore, you can calculate the income, profits and ROI for each advertising channel, associating successful transaction and its amount with a specific user and call. In order to select the desired information for transmission to CRM different configuration options are provided.

As we can see, the solution to implement call tracking can become a useful step in achieving better performance.

Based on our experience and feedback that we receive from our clients the following steps will help to reduce the number of untargeted calls to your company

Work on the content of the site

• Set up a simple site navigation system to help the potential customers in their search. Don’t force the users to wander around the site, because no one wants a complicated journey leading to the page desired.
• Don’t “pollute” your website with colorful advertising and pop-up banners. Such content distorts the perception of information and annoys customers pushing them to visit the sites of competitors.
• Try to place the important information on a conspicuous place.
• It’s desirable to provide different convenient ways of communication with the website for the visitors. These can be phone numbers, chats, online forms, and so on. It’s better to place them on the header, because not many customers scroll the page up to the end in order to see the contacts.
• In addition, analyze questions coming up time and again from a wide variety of customers to produce an intelligible FAQ. You can also write articles with extensive answers to these questions.

Reduce the number of untargeted calls from the search engine result pages

•  Use the advanced snippets. A snippet is a flow of information displayed in the search engine results. Conventional snippets contain a title, a brief description of the site and a link to it. Advanced snippets can add the information about the location of the enterprise, its working hours and contact phone numbers. All this makes your ads more attractive and “clickable”.
• Choose the negative keywords for search engines wisely. These are the words preventing your advertisements from displaying for particular keyword phrases. For example, if you promote the service of a medical clinic, you should exclude the exposures of your ads for fans of the TV series “The Clinic”. In order to do this, choose the negative keywords “season”, “series”, “online viewing”. Thus you’ll reduce the number of calls from people led by the incorrect keyword.

We hope this article has been useful and you’ve found the answers to your questions. However, if you have something to ask on this or another topic, feel free to consult our tech support.