Phone conversions are an often overlooked but critical piece of the customer journey and marketers who place focus on call conversions are reaping significant rewards, according to new research conducted for A Wake-Up Call for CMOs: The Unexpected Impact of Call Conversions on Marketing ROI, a CMO Solution Guide in partnership with DialogTech,
The guide, which features seven interviews with CMOs and marketing leaders from major companies like Esurance, Expedia, LegalZoom, LendingTree and more, contains insights, best practices and strategies for phone call conversions that top-performing marketers are using to significantly improve digital marketing ROI and enhance customer acquisition and loyalty.
You can download the guide here.
Susan Bryant, CMO of DialogTech explains the details of the research to DIVERGE:
Why do CMOs need a wake up call?
Many CMOs are under-leveraging the power and potential of phone call conversions. Even in today’s digital world, a phone conversation driven from marketing is often the best way for organizations to earn a customer’s business. And as digital advertising grows increasingly mobile, these conversations are becoming more common—with calls to U.S. businesses from mobile advertising channels expected to reach over 160 billion by 2019, a 73% increase from 2015. Despite the growing importance of phone calls to marketing success, however, many CMOs still focus their marketing attribution and analytics efforts on online activity while ignoring phone conversations. And this can be a significant oversight and missed opportunity – one that can have a strong negative impact on marketing ROI and customer acquisition.
What were some of the key results of the research that was conducted?
Based on our conversations with CMOs and other senior marketers in a variety of industries, we learned that businesses that attribute and optimize call conversions from their marketing channels, measure how those calls are converting to customers and revenue, and analyze and improve the caller experience are seeing better returns on their marketing spend. We further validated that, in most industries, phone conversations driven by marketing play an important, and often necessary, role in the customer journey.
How will the guide help marketers?
For marketers, this pragmatic guide explains why calls have become important to marketing ROI and shares the strategies that top-performing marketers are using to improve customer acquisition and loyalty from call conversions. It covers not only attribution and analytics strategies for phone calls, but also ways to help ensure callers from marketing initiatives are receiving a quality experience that encourages conversion.
Why did DialogTech and the CMO Club partner for this?
Because despite the importance of phone calls to marketing ROI, many CMOs haven’t thought much about phone call conversions. The CMO Club is made up of the most engaged group of client side CMOs and Dialog Tech is a thought leader in the area of call conversions.Thus, we wanted to provide real-world insights to elevate the awareness and potential of phone call conversation for CMOs who are under utilizing them in the marketing mix. Phone calls rarely get the media coverage that online conversions and in-store visits do, making them easy for CMOs to overlook or ignore. But as you can learn in this guide, for many businesses phone calls play a greater role in determining marketing ROI than online conversions. And there are established best practices CMOs and their teams can implement to get the most value from these calls.
Why don’t purchases happen without phone conversations?
In some industries they do. People buy things online all the time without calling a business first. But phone conversations have always been a critical part of the customer journey for industries with expensive, complex, or infrequent purchases. For these businesses, consumers need to talk to a real person to get the answers they need to make a purchasing decision. Industries like automotive, insurance, financial services, travel and hospitality, home services, and many others all rely on phone conversations to acquire customers.
What were some stats/results that surprised you during the study?
Seeing just how prevalent phone calls conversions were from mobile advertising can be a real eye-opener for many CMOs that haven’t thought about phone calls. Search, social and display advertising, for example, drove over 108 billion call conversions to U.S. businesses in 2016. That’s a staggering amount – and that number is going to grow to 162 billion calls in 2019. Plus, seeing stats on the value of calls, namely that they convert to revenue 10 times more than web leads and will influence over $1 trillion in US commerce this year, also shows just how important they are to marketing success.
