5 Ways Call Tracking Can Complete Your Marketing Automation Solution

Like many others before me, discovering marketing automation was a defining point in my career. And once you see the light, there’s no going back. I remember the old days of sending out email campaigns without any knowledge of how those campaigns were affecting conversions or contributing to pipeline. But marketing automation tools such as Marketo enable marketers to gain full visibility into leads’ online behavior throughout the sales cycle. At Revenue.io, we use Marketo in tandem with Salesforce.com and can actually track ROI from email click-throughs, web form submissions and other online efforts.

A Salesforce.com study recently showed that companies that use marketing automation have a 53% higher conversion rate than companies than non-users. No matter what your budget and needs, there’s likely a solution that fits the bill.

When Traditional Marketing Automation Doesn’t Go Far Enough

The primary problem with traditional marketing automation is that many companies sell by phone, and existing solutions only track online behavior. According to BIA/Kelsey, $68 billion in domestic advertising costs is spent each year specifically to generate phone calls. That means that when any of your customers see your ad and decide to call rather than submitting a web form, you won’t be able to track which marketing effort triggered the phone call.

Download our whitepaper to learn how to build a complete marketing automation solution

The answer is pairing your marketing automation solution with a call tracking solution. Here are five ways that a CRM-based call tracking solution like Revenue.io can help you build a complete marketing automation suite.

Capture Phone Leads

Logging phone calls is one of the more basic features that we offer, yet it’s extremely powerful. In fact, a prospect once said she’d jump through the phone and kiss us if we could give her a way to not only automatically log every call in Salesforce.com, but also to associate it with a Salesforce campaign. A moment later, she saw that we had done precisely that.

This solves a huge problem for your sales team, which is that sales reps don’t want to spend time manually logging calls in their CRM. And even if they log most of their calls, there’s no assurance that the data is correct—to err is human, after all. With call tracking, there’s no need to rely on sales reps logging calls. Every phone lead is automatically added to the measurable marketing funnel.

Score Leads Based on Call Activity

One of the most powerful features that a solution such as Marketo offers is the ability to score leads. Marketers can automatically tabulate a lead’s score based on activities like downloading whitepapers, reading blog posts and clicking through links from emails. However, when a lead actually picks up the phone and calls a business, it can be one of the clearest indicators of demand. Our call tracking solution gives marketers real-time insight into sales activity, enabling sales teams to log call outcomes and score calls. If a sales rep is talking to a lead that isn’t ready to purchase, marketing can know instantly and assign that lead to a nurturing campaign.

Bring Offline Leads Online

Lead nurturing is the cornerstone of B2B marketing. When offline leads are captured in your CRM, you can ensure that they get the follow-up attention they need. Should they be sent a deck? Might it help to send them some informative emails? With a CRM-based call tracking solution, phone leads can benefit from the same nurturing as online leads.

Track ROI from Offline Campaigns

Here at Revenue.io, we’re currently using Marketo with Salesforce in order to tie our email campaigns to leads, opportunities and ROI. But with call tracking, marketers can actually track ROI from offline campaigns in their CRM. This is vital for businesses that market across multiple channels. Marketers can track the ROI of event collateral, radio ads, television ads, billboards, direct mail and other offline efforts with the same level of precision as online efforts.

Know Which Keywords Cause the Phone to Ring

Without a call tracking solution, marketers can only report which keywords lead to online conversions. But we built our solution to enable marketers to go one step further. With Revenue.io, marketers can know which keywords impact all leads, opportunities and revenue, not simply those that close online. Marketers just provision unique numbers that are associated with keywords. Our dynamic number insertion (DNI) technology then automatically replaces your company’s number on any landing page with the unique number associated with the keyword. When the lead calls, marketers instantly know which keyword caused the phone to ring. And with Salesforce.com, marketers can not only see which keywords are driving the most calls, but also the best calls. The result is that marketers can make better decisions about which organic keywords to include in landing pages and digital content, as well as which keywords to bid on in paid search campaigns.