Today’s consumer has higher standards for their experience than ever before—they want brands to anticipate their needs and deliver a tailored interaction. In a recent survey by Evergage and Researchscape, 85% of marketers reported that their customers have come to expect experiences that are personalized to them.
Brands are meeting the demand for personalization by shifting their priorities and budgets toward people-based marketing. Think of the way a barista remembers a frequent customer’s coffee order and prepares it exactly to their specifications at each visit. Now, imagine that same level of personalization applied at scale—where a brand can use insights from every consumer interaction to deliver relevant, helpful, and personalized experiences in real time, whether online, in person, or over the phone. That is people-based marketing.
People-Based Marketing Can’t Work Without Comprehensive Consumer Data
Despite the fact that nearly nine in ten marketers now deploy personalization to improve customer experiences, the study found that only 18% of marketers are highly confident that their firm has a successful personalization strategy in place.
So, why is crafting a winning people-based marketing strategy so challenging? In order to tailor experiences, marketers need to understand consumers’ past brand interactions across all channels and devices. Today’s consumer journey is more fragmented than ever before, making it difficult to collect data and organize it into a unified consumer view. In fact, 74% of marketers say their company has a “a few” or “no” channels connected. Additionally, 45% of marketers say they don’t have the data and insights they need to power effective personalization.
Your people-based marketing strategy is only as strong as your data. To unify the end-to-end consumer journey and enhance intelligence, brands are arming their martech stacks with an often-overlooked source of first-party data: consumer calls.
Call Analytics Solutions Turn Consumer Calls Into Actionable Marketing Data
With the help of call analytics solutions like DialogTech, marketers are capturing insights on consumer calls at scale and automatically pushing call data to their martech stack. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: The Consumer Calls
Consumers call your business from a trackable phone number dynamically displayed on your website, in call extensions in search results, or in your offline campaigns and other marketing.
Step 2: The Call Is Attributed, Routed, Recorded, and Transcribed
The marketing source that drove the call—along with information on the caller such as their name, phone number, and location—is used to automatically route the caller to the best agent or location to assist them. The phone conversation is recorded, transcribed, and stored along with the information on the caller and what drove the call.
Step 3: The Conversation Is Analyzed with AI
AI analyzes the transcription and identifies key data points, such as the caller’s lead score, urgency, interest, whether or not the caller converted, and much more. Those insights are visualized in reports and dashboards.
Step 4: Caller Insights Are Pushed to Your Martech Stack
Insights from AI tied to information on the caller and what marketing source drove the call are activated across your martech stack to better inform your digital strategies and personalize consumer experiences.
With this rich source of first-party data, marketers are able to connect the consumer journey and provide better, more relevant experiences for consumers both online and over the phone. Below are 5 tips to use call analytics data to drive more conversions from your people-based marketing strategy.
Tip 1: Retarget Callers Who Didn’t Convert More Accurately
Once you’ve armed your martech stack with call analytics data, you’re ready to leverage these insights to target the right consumers with the right ads at the right time. Without this call data, marketers have no way of knowing which consumers already contacted their business via a phone call. They’re also completely in the dark about which of those callers are qualified leads, what products or services they genuine expressed interest in, and whether or not they already converted over the phone.
But with call analytics data, marketers can retarget callers based on the phone conversations they had and create a personalized omnichannel experience. Let’s take this fictitious example: you’re a resort and someone calls with high intent to book a stay, but doesn’t convert on the call. They also mention that they’re getting married in 3 months, the trip would serve as their honeymoon, and they aren’t interested in excursions like scuba diving. Using this data, you can retarget them with honeymoon campaigns across Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and programmatic display for 3 months and exclude them from seeing irrelevant ads about weddings and scuba diving.
Tip 2: Put Callers Who Converted into Relevant Upsell or Cross-sell Campaigns
With call analytics, you can also track which consumers convert to appointments or customers over the phone. This enhances your people-based marketing by helping you better determine next actions for each caller. If a caller converted, you can target them with ads for relevant companion products or services—such as if a caller buys a vehicle you can serve them ads for maintenance, or if our previous resort caller books a room, you can target them with ads for your upgraded wine package.
Let’s illustrate with a more detailed example. You’re a marketer at an insurance company and someone buys car insurance from a local agent over the phone. During the conversation, they mention they’re also currently closing on their first home. The closing process takes, on average, two months and homeowner’s insurance is a requirement. For 60 days, you can put them in a retargeting discount campaign for bundling homeowner’s insurance with auto, while excluding them from seeing ads for renter’s insurance.
If there are no relevant offers to upsell or cross-sell a consumer, you can exclude them from seeing future ads to avoid wasting your spend.
Tip 3: Personalize Callers’ Experiences on Your Website
By understanding key attributes about each caller, such as their buying intent and the products/services they are interested in, marketers can provide personalized website experiences as an extension of their people-based marketing strategies.
For example, let’s say you’re an automaker and you have a caller who expressed genuine interest in one of your midsize SUVs but didn’t convert. You could use this data to create a custom web experience for the caller. When they go back to your site, you can put the SUV in the homepage banner with a special financing offer.
You can also serve website visitors with product recommendations based on their phone conversations. For instance, if you’re a home improvement retailer and someone called to ask questions about a specific model of grill, you can automatically update your homepage recommendations to show them that grill with a special sale price, along with comparable options.
Tip 4: Route Callers Optimally to Close More Sales
When consumers call, they expect to get the right assistance right away. Long hold times and multiple transfers can alienate customers and decrease your conversion rates.
We’ve already explained how at the time of each call, DialogTech collects caller profile data, such as their name, phone number, and the geographic location they called from as well as the marketing source that drove their call. Marketers can, in turn, set up rules in DialogTech to automatically route each caller optimally based on that data and how your business processes.
For example, if you’re an insurance company and someone in Minneapolis called from your “auto insurance quote” paid search keyword, you could automatically route them to the nearest auto insurance agent in Minneapolis for a quote, instead of potentially sending them to an unhelpful agent who would then have to transfer them.
Tip 5: Pass Insights on Callers to Agents or Locations
To provide seamless experiences when consumers call, you can pass the profile data DialogTech captured from the call—their name, geographic location, call history, and the webpage or ad they called from—to your agents. They’ll, in turn, be able to better anticipate caller needs, deliver a seamless online-to-offline experience, and tailor the conversation to win the sale.
For example, a leading healthcare provider’s contact center handles 150,000 calls a month, including marketing-related inquiries. For calls that originated from the digital channel, they use DialogTech to capture insights on the marketing source that drove the call and pass that data to contact center agents on their desktops via a screen pop. Before answering the call, agents can see the marketing channel and type of doctor the consumer is calling about so they can immediately understand intent and provide a better experience.
Automatically pass caller profile data to your agents so they can tailor the interaction to win the sale
High-Converting People-Based Campaigns Require a Deep, 360-Degree View of Your Consumer.
Today’s consumers want relevant people-based experiences from brands at every touchpoint—and it’s marketing’s responsibility to deliver it. If you don’t, many will take their business elsewhere.
Calls to your business are just as important as interactions on your website. By using information on consumers to personalize their call experiences—and then using those phone conversations to provide callers the most relevant online experiences—marketers can create a data-driven optimization loop that generates more loyal customers and drives revenue.
To learn more personalization best practices, download our eBook: Fuel People-Based Marketing with Call Analytics.