Optimizing Your Marketing With Voice-Based Marketing Automation

Feature Friday: Optimizing Your Marketing With Voice-Based Marketing Automation

Guest post by Olivia Cole

Marketers—or at least marketers who are interested in improving their campaigns—are always seeking ways to better understand the effectiveness of their marketing and reduce the amount of ad spend they waste on ads that don’t work. Call tracking has emerged as one remedy to the problem of measuring ROI: with the ability to track leads that originate both online and offline, marketers have increasingly greater insight into their leads. Call tracking is also useful for lead conversion and closing sales. But the smart marketers who know the value of call tracking also know something else, and that’s the fact that call tracking isn’t where the buck stops for marketers looking to improve their campaigns and close more leads.

The Right Lead to the Right Agent

When a phone leads comes in, call tracking tools enable you to see the source of the lead. So what happens next? Smart marketers know that this is an opportunity to improve the chances of conversion: a meticulous lead response strategy is required to make the most out of the prospect. How your business responds to incoming calls can be the difference between winning a sale and throwing it in the trash. Using a voice-based marketing automation (VBMA) tool like intelligent call routing, you have the ability to get a call to the right agent at the right time, increasing your chances of turning the lead into a sale.

What makes the agent the “right” agent depends on the nature of the marketing campaign or source that generated the call. Smart marketers use call tracking to measure ROI, but call tracking does more than that: it provides information about the caller that your agent can use to close the sale. The helpful data mined by call tracking can be used to help close a sale: neglecting this data means only using a fraction of the power that call tracking provides. If a caller is responding to an ad for a newly released product, for example, you should have that caller routed directly to the specific agent who handles those leads. Intelligent call routing makes it possible to send the call to that specific agent’s office phone, home phone, and cell phone simultaneously, ensuring they answer the call no matter where they are. The agent can then receive a whisper message—another VBMA tool—telling them exactly what the phone lead was looking for, and the conversation begins one step closer to a sale.

The Importance of Fast Lead Response

In the old days, the phone would ring to your call center, and the next available agent would answer the call. It doesn’t have to be this cut and dried. You can arrange incoming calls to ring agents in a predetermined order; you can ring any number of your agents simultaneously; you can forward calls to specific agents based on your office schedule, sales territory, or areas of expertise; you can set certain agent’s to be reached on Skype if they’re working from home.

And if the lead doesn’t call? If they submit a web form asking to be contacted? Their information is captured and your agents should be acting on that information immediately. Studies have shown that responding to a lead in an hour or less increases the likelihood of conversion by seven, and VBMA tools have the ability to make that under-an-hour lead response possible by instantly triggering a phone call to the right sales rep or group of reps as soon as the lead click “submit.” Once that agent accepts the call, VBMA connects her directly to the lead.

Ad Dollars Aren’t the Only Thing You’re Wasting

Smart marketers know that the buck doesn’t stop at call tracking: if you’re tracking the success of your online and offline ads, then you’re home free. But what happens after a prospect becomes a lead is just as important, and when marketing teams fail to realize this, they’re throwing away the very leads they plotted ad dollars to capture.