Online marketing has given marketing teams insight that, in years past, they could only dream about. But sometimes, no matter how closely customers are tracked, from spotting the keywords used in their initial search engine query, to the follow-up customer satisfaction survey, some will buy offline without leaving the crucial footprint that identifies what brought them to you.
So what can you do when the digital marketing trail goes cold?
The tools and techniques used to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing spend can be incredibly scientific. By tracking a customer’s journey from the initial search, email, advert or link all the way through to online conversion, marketing teams are able to accurately measure customer acquisition costs to determine the most efficient use of marketing budgets.
While web marketing and a website may attract a customer’s interest, often customers will still choose to pick up the phone to enquire about or buy a product or service. Someone may have a question too esoteric to be covered in an online FAQ, or may have a special request not addressed during the standard online sales process – not forgetting the still-commonplace old-fashioned preference of speaking to someone. While the sale can still be processed, the customer fails to leave a digital footprint and so disables marketers’ methods of automatically tracking the source of the lead and therefore assigning value and return to digital marketing activities.
One way to get around this is to offer an online-only service and abandon contact centres entirely. This is a risky gamble. Often it does not have the desired effect of ensuring the customer uses the online system, but results in frustration as they search fruitlessly for a number, and consult a competitor instead. Email contact forms and ‘live chat’ facilities are not going to work for those who demand an answer now and need it from a human.
So how can you then accurately track the source of the prospects your contact centre is dealing with? Customers that don’t leave a digital footprint could well be the majority of your customer base, and therefore those that prove most important to track.
Contact centre agents could very simply ask a customer “how did you hear of us?” But they will often reply with “I Googled you” and not know the exact term used; or mistake a PPC advert for an organic search engine result; or of course, they may have simply forgotten.
Alternatively, you could use different phone numbers in the various materials for each marketing channel – but in this digital age when customers and prospects are prone to require multiple touches from multiple channels before making contact, this doesn’t give you the sort of detailed information you need.
The insurance industry in particular suffers from this issue. Insurance brokers often provide policies and products for non-standard circumstances. In these situations, an online form is simply not enough to gather the information needed to provide bespoke policies.
When customers call to say exactly what they need, the insurer often has no idea what brought them there – and the contact centre agent is understandably more focused on closing the sale than getting detailed information on how a customer found them.
The result is that cost of acquisition isn’t accurate and marketing spend isn’t optimised. If all you can do is track those people making the ‘perfect’ customer journey with no bumps along the way, such as abandoning the website for a phone call, you have no real insight at all. And if your insight is not up to scratch, nor is next year’s marketing plan and nor is your board-level budget request.
The solution is both simple and, on a technology level, rather sophisticated. Call tracking technology now exists to allow you to provide each individual customer with a unique phone number which precisely identifies their specific journeys to your site. Because the number is identified when the inbound call is placed, this therefore bridges their online activity with their offline activity and ultimately, their conversion.
Suddenly, digital marketers can allocate value and return to each channel – even to the level of each keyword or PPC ad – and therefore determine how much future investment is appropriate.
Accurately tracking these inbound phone calls will help organisations to close a growing gap in their lead generation and detection activity and provide them with a complete customer picture. For businesses where at least half of the response to online activity is inbound calls, paid search performance would be expected to improve by 15%.
This means businesses could, with the right technology, track the paths of those customers who are currently slipping by unnoticed. This represents a huge opportunity for marketers to refine and target their efforts. After all, how confident are you that you’re basing your digital marketing decisions on the complete picture of your current customer acquisition?
