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5 Industries That Need Call Tracking Solutions to Stay Competitive

Revenue Blog  > 5 Industries That Need Call Tracking Solutions to Stay Competitive
7 min readMay 8, 2020

The reason for using call tracking software is simple: if you’re closing any business by phone, you should measure call metrics with the same degree of diligence that you’d use to track online behavior. Call tracking software can add tremendous value to businesses across a wide range of industries. Here’s a cross section of businesses types that often don’t invest in call tracking software, but should. We’ll explore some ways that these businesses can drive more revenue by adopting call tracking solutions.

Hotels

Imagine that you own a beautiful resort in the Bahamas. Your resort offers all the same amenities as the name brands and then some. It takes a lot of advertising to get noticed, to say nothing of inspiring guests to pick up their phones and book a room. With call tracking software, you could easily know which radio ads, television ads and direct mailing efforts offer the best ROI. You might, for example, find that an expensive direct mailing campaign was not nearly as lucrative as a well-placed TV ad during a Miami Dolphins game.

Nonprofit Organizations

While most nonprofit organizations use a variety of fundraising channels (including SMS and online), the phone has hardly vanished. As a dedicated NPR listener, I am regularly subjected to those pledge drives in which they make you feel guilty for all the joy you’ve gotten from listening and politely ask you to call in and make a donation. (Full disclosure: I’ve called in and donated two cars to NPR in the past 5 years, so their tactics at least seem to work on me).

Since there are still a lot of nonprofit organizations using the telephone as a fundraising channel, it makes sense to track which efforts drive calls from donors. By using call tracking software and a CRM solution like Salesforce.com, a nonprofit organization can compare how much funds were raised over the phone with the funds raised via other channels. Nonprofit businesses can also use call tracking to determine which direct mail campaigns have the biggest impact. By using unique phone numbers, a charity can see which mailing campaigns best resonate with potential donors.

Cosmetic Medicine

Medical professionals offering procedures like LASIK, plastic surgery, Lapband and Invisiline commonly book a lot of their appointments over the telephone. They also often invest in multiple advertising channels including radio, billboards, ads on benches and more. By assigning unique numbers to these various advertising channels, doctors practicing cosmetic medicine will know which of these efforts are helping to fill their appointment calendars and which are just a waste of money.

Anyone who has watched television during the day is likely familiar with ads featuring lawyers promising to get you the largest car accident settlement or insurance claim. Law offices do a lot of business by phone. But imagine that a law office is running two high profile commercials during daytime talk shows. One features a woman talking about how much money she won in a settlement. The other features a lawyer delivering the tough words,”I’ll fight for you!” With call tracking, the law office can figure out which messaging drives the most new clients. The law office might find that potential clients care more about a lawyer sounding tough than promising large rewards. If so, they can invest in additional content with messaging that has been proven successful with call tracking software.

SaaS Companies

Since Revenue.io is a B2B SaaS company, I know firsthand how helpful call tracking can be when selling software. We have the ability to assign a unique number to each email campaign, Google AdWords keyword, YouTube video and more. The result is that we gain insight into which efforts are driving calls. And since we also use Salesforce.com, we also know which which efforts drive leads, opportunities and revenue. We know how competitive the software market is and we also know that call tracking can give businesses a real edge. That’s why we set out to develop a call tracking solution to begin with.

These are only some of the types of businesses that can gain more insight and make smarter marketing decisions by investing in call tracking software. Call tracking isn’t right for every business model, but if you close deals over the phone, chances are you can benefit from a call tracking solution.

SaaS Impact and Growth

Over the last decade, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model has become more clearly defined. New cloud-based startups are popping up every week. They compete for market share through a variety of marketing efforts such as paid search ads and inbound content marketing, with the bigger players at the higher end pouring a lot of money into in-person events such as conferences. While online conversion metrics are often tracked with diligence,  a surprising number of SaaS companies fail to track the impact of marketing efforts on phone calls. Whether your business is a cloud startup or an enterprise SaaS company, odds are that you’re losing a lot of business over the phone. If so, then tracking calls could be the quickest way launch your marketing ROI to new heights.

Here are some ways for SaaS companies to gain visibility and grow revenue with call tracking:

Maximize Event Impact

If you’re in the SaaS world, you’re probably no stranger to events, conferences and conventions. Large SaaS companies typically host their own events once a year or more. Call tracking can be crucial to determining the ROI of those events. You can use unique phone numbers on power point presentations, at conference booths, in printed collateral and more to see which efforts are really worth the investment. Without the ability to track offline efforts, it can be impossible to tell whether the spot on the conference floor that you spent thousands of dollars to reserve really paid off. You can also compare the ROI of different events to see which ones are worth returning to the following year.

Invest in the Best Paid Search Keywords

SaaS companies typically invest in paid search channels like Bing and AdWords in order to drive more qualified traffic to their web properties. While it’s relatively easy to track the online impact of paid search campaigns, the moment a customer picks up their phone and calls your business, all insight into lead sources are lost. Unless you have a way to track calls, that is. A first-rate call tracking solution will let you track at the campaign, ad group and associated keywords, offering different levels of granularity based on your company’s budget and needs. This enables your marketing department to know which paid search groups and keywords offer the best returns. Your ad manager can then invest more in the paid search efforts proven to drive ROI.

Boost Organic Search Traffic

Content marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of the SaaS business model. By optimizing content like blogs and whitepapers around the most powerful keyphrases, you can drive qualified inbound leads to your site. But if you are optimizing content for the wrong keywords, you might end up with more traffic, but it might not be the right traffic. By using a call tracking solution, you can gain insight into which keywords drive the best calls. And if you are using a CRM-based call tracking solution, you can track keywords all the way through the sales cycle.

Align Sales and Marketing Through Shared Data

Since Salesforce.com pioneered the SaaS revolution, CRM usage has become nearly omnipresent in the SaaS space. CRMs like Salesforce.com don’t just help sales teams manage their relationships. They also build much-needed bridges between sales and marketing departments. For example, when building our call tracking solution, we made it easy to share marketing referral data with sales teams in real time. Reps can therefore instantly know who is calling and what they want to buy. We also developed routing capabilities that can actually automatically route calls to the right rep based on the promotion or URL that a prospect saw before making a call. As reps close deals, marketers can then look at real-time dashboards to see which efforts are driving ROI and adjust marketing spend accordingly.

Route Calls Based on Marketing Campaigns

While call tracking solutions can help marketers invest more in the most successful efforts, the best call tracking solutions also offer a routing component to help ensure that reps have the right conversations with the right prospects at the right time. Imagine that your company sells search engine optimization (SEO) software and email marketing solutions. With call tracking you could determine that a prospect called after seeing an ad in Bing for “SEO software,” and then with the routing component, you could then make certain that that prospect is routed to a rep skilled at selling SEO software. Otherwise, that prospect might have been routed to the wrong agent or to a receptionist and then put on hold. Every moment a prospect is on hold increases the chances that they’ll hang up and call a competitor. A call tracking solution with intelligent routing capabilities can completely solve this problem.

If you’re considering investing in a call tracking solution, read Call Tracking: The Definitive Buyers’ Guide to find out more ways that call tracking can add value to your SaaS business.