How to Personalize the Online Customer Journey with Offline Call Analytics

As you create digital marketing campaigns, it’s important to offer an exceptional experience that caters to your customer’s specific needs, preferences, and stage in the customer journey. After all, highly relevant, personalized digital campaigns can lower customer acquisition costs by up to 50 percent, increase revenue by between 5 and 15 percent, and improve the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30 percent, according to McKinsey & Company. But how do you make sure that you’re optimizing the digital ads and landing pages you serve up to your prospects and enticing them to continue their interaction with your brand?

It starts with marketing analytics — monitoring and analyzing your consumers’ online behavior to understand how they interact with your ads and website. From how they search, to the digital ads they interact with, to the pages they view on your site, you can begin to create audience segments that you can use to improve the personalization of your ad campaigns and messaging

But what happens when your customers take their online journey offline by calling your company instead of filling out a web form? Do you have a way to track those interactions? And can you use data on callers to personalize your digital campaigns to improve ROI and drive revenue?

If you aren’t capturing and leveraging marketing analytics on callers, you’re missing out on a key source of information that you could use to optimize the customer journey. After all, inbound calls to businesses from mobile ads alone are expected to reach 162 billion by 2019.

Enable Better Results With Call Analytics

The right call analytics solution can provide you with data and insights on callers, and that data can help you better personalize your online campaigns. It can tell you the channel, ad, keyword search, and website experience that drove every call, and capture analytics on the conversation to measure lead quality, caller intent, and outcome.

Adding those insights from phone calls can help personalize and optimize the customer journey, for current as well as future prospects. With 52 percent of consumers reporting that they’re likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize its communications to them, it’s more important than ever to tailor your digital reach to your audience. That means you need to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right point in their journey, at the exact moment they want it. And then you need to encourage non-converting customers to continue their journey after the call and keep building your relationship with your existing stable of customers.

Here are some steps you can take for calls that enable you to improve marketing ROI, drive revenue, and better personalize customer experiences.

Get Customers to Call

Many consumers want to call, especially when they are making a complex or expensive purchase. So, make it easy for these prospects to pick up the phone. Retarget them with ads that encourage them to call: create a call to action on a landing page that incentivizes them to dial in. Place your phone number prominently in the ad. Add an eye-catching “call” button on the landing page for those who click through to your site.

Maximize Every Call

When customers call, use the intelligence you have to route the call to the best possible agent or location to convert them. Call analytics solutions — also known as call tracking — do more than just gather data; some have rules and logic built in that can send callers to the perfect person to handle their issue, depending on their location, the day and time of the call, the marketing source that drove the call, the agent’s expertise, and more.

Taking it a step further, you can route calls from the most profitable channels to the most successful sales agents. And, for locations where agents are underperforming, you can coach them and offer scripts to improve their conversion rates.

Retargeting at the Right Time

Where do your callers fall in their customer journey? It’s hard to know without having access to their history. And that’s where call data comes into play. Call analytics provides a powerful new layer for smarter retargeting.

The more data you have, the more you learn about your customers, and the more likely you can build your customer relationship by helping them take the next logical step in the journey. You can create segmented targeting lists and send them search, social, and display ads tailored to their needs and designed to overcome their objections.

For example, for new customers who call and express interest in a specific product but are reluctant to buy at the current price, retarget them with a special discount that resonates with them rather than with a generic ad with less impact. Or for customers who have bought from you previously, you can retarget them with an ad for additional services that build on their initial purchase. Be sure your ads use “call now” as the CTA to encourage them to convert in their preferred way.

Reignite the Customer Relationship

Repeat customers are an important source of revenue for many businesses. If loyal customers have fallen off the radar, you can run ads designed to entice them to call you and use your products or services again.

One way to do this is to send them targeted ad campaigns with special incentives, such as a limited-time discount. You can also use “IF” functions in search ads, inserting specific language for mobile shoppers on their smartphones that asks them to call you for a special offer.

Upsell and Cross-Sell

If you sell products or services that complement one another, you can use call analytics to drive additional revenue. Encourage existing customers to upgrade or add on to previous purchases by showing them campaigns with a “call now” call to action. The key is to time your targeting correctly: too soon, and customers will tune you out, and too late, and they’re likely to have purchased already on their own.

Grow Your Audience

Who are the best prospects to reach? Often they look a lot like your customers who have already converted. Targeting these “lookalike audiences” is easier than ever with call analytics, which can help you find customers whose characteristics closely match past callers who converted. Evaluate which channel, ad, landing page, and keyword drove each converting caller with conversation analytics technology, and then target new audiences with a similar ad campaign.

Maximize Your Ad Budget

Don’t waste valuable ad resources on consumers who aren’t worthwhile targets: those who already purchased, will never purchase, or who aren’t part of your selected audience. For instance, you can fine-tune audience exclusions with call analytics to exclude customers who already called from campaigns designed to generate new leads. Or if you want to boost online conversions, don’t send those campaigns to past callers. And be sure to exclude calls that don’t relate to sales, such as job applicants who called from your career page or vendors soliciting your business.

You can also use call data to optimize your digital campaigns for future prospects. While clicks, likes, and follows give you a glimpse into your customers’ thinking, you can complete the picture by collecting insights from their phone calls. Determine which phrases callers use to describe their pain points and the solutions they need. Some solutions analyze conversations as soon as a call ends, allowing you to filter searches based on campaign, date, call duration, caller location, and more. With this information, you can refine keyword targeting, landing pages, and digital ads. You can also use the questions that callers ask to better frame your web content.

Together Is Better

Together, data from online and offline channels, gathered through call analytics, offers an unmatched continuous learning loop that you can use to optimize your advertising, strengthen the customer journey, and drive more revenue.

Want to learn more strategies and specific examples of how to improve your digital targeting with call analytics? Check out our eBook, Optimize Your Search, Facebook, and Display Targeting with Call Analytics.