Earlier this year we brought you Marchex Speech Analytics, and the adoption from our customers was exceptional. Today, I couldn’t be more excited to follow up with another industry first – Marchex Audience Targeting.

According to eMarketer, Americans now spend nearly 12 hours each day consuming media, and it is clear that how we make decisions on products and services is increasingly influenced by digital and mobile content and advertisements.  With US adults spending an average of 5 hours and 30 minutes per day on social media, we should expect that future consumers’ path to purchase to be even more influenced by media than ever before.

Even as we spend more time online, the vast majority of purchases occur offline, in the real-world.  According to Deloitte Digital, $2.9 trillion in in-store sales will be influenced by mobile devices this year, along with our forecast of $1.2 trillion in phone sales influenced by mobile devices.

These changes mean that digital marketers need an expanded set of data and tools in order to fully connect, understand and acquire customers throughout their path to purchase. Do you want to reach and convert more of your best customers? You can now with caller-based Audience Targeting.

Marchex Audience Targeting helps marketers target high-intent customers along their path to purchase. Marketers will be able to reach more customers by retargeting callers across social and display networks, or using that data to create new lookalike audiences. The result is more revenue and a better customer experience.

With Marchex Audience Targeting You Can:

• Get Real-Time Insights: See how often callers are using your promotional term and if they’re converting to customers; if not, you can retarget them online right away.

• Build Data-Driven Segmentation: Use Call insights through speech analytics and advanced targeting to close more opportunities and optimize ad creative based on competitive features that get customers to respond.

• Effectively Retarget Prospects: Create specialized campaigns to turn your caller into a customer—before they’ve moved onto your competitor.

To learn more about how Marchex can help your business connect, understand and acquire new customers, please contact us today.

Today, if you are a marketer, it’s not enough for you to just generate leads.

No, it’s also vital for you to identify the sources of your leads, so you know which of your campaigns are performing well and which need improvement.

Call tracking can be used to identify which of your marketing campaigns triggered a particular call. Assign a unique virtual number to each lead source like magazine ads, search ads or your website, and you will know how the caller found you. This data allows you to reallocate your spend to the best performing channels and optimize or even discontinue the laggards.

But call tracking can be used to do a lot more. It can be used to attribute leads and conversions with surprising accuracy, as well as optimize your marketing messages.

Here are 5 things you didn’t know call tracking could do:

1. Track Omnichannel Conversions

Customer journeys are rarely straightforward. Someone might click on your Facebook ad but might not call you immediately. Later, they might do a Google search, find your website and call you.

But how will you know that the Facebook ad played a role in triggering the Google search?

If you use a call tracking and analytics platform like Marchex ®, the technology will understand whether the Facebook visit preceded the Google search in the customer journey, allowing you to make smarter, more informed media buying decisions.

2. Optimize PPC Keywords

Use can use keyword level attribution to know which keywords callers searched for before they clicked on your ad. You can assign a unique virtual phone number to be displayed to each unique visitor. That visitor would continue to see that same number whichever page they browse your site. This number would also be tagged to the keyword which triggered your ad, telling you which keywords are leading to calls.  You can use this data to optimize your bids.

3. User Journeys

Using unique numbers for each visitor will also allow you to track each visitor’s journey through your website. This will allow you to understand exactly which pages and elements on your website are driving calls, as well as which pages are causing visitors to drop off. You can use this information to continually keep optimizing your website.

4. High Intent Calls

Identify all calls that have a “high intent” to purchase. By using keyword tracking with Marchex Speech Analytics as part of your Call Analytics platform, you can identify which keywords are triggering those calls. You can optimize your ad bids according to quality of calls rather than volume, and dramatically increase your final conversion rates.

5. Allocate Manpower

Your call tracking data will tell you when you get the most qualified calls. Accordingly, you can make sure that you have enough inbound sales team members available during those times, so that you miss as few calls as possible.

Conclusion

Call Tracking can give you invaluable information that you can use to optimize your marketing spend, improve your marketing copy or even optimize your Salesforce allocation. It’s the next step towards generating better leads while spending less!

To learn more about how Marchex can assist with your call tracking and analytics needs, please contact us today

Frank Ohlhorst of GIGAOM recently spent some time with Marchex to understand our newest product, Marchex Speech Analytics. His review was a thorough and accurate representation of the work my colleagues and I have spent years developing, and it was great to see his review in print. More than six million people trust GIGAOM each month for accurate and timely research and analysis of emerging technology. I couldn’t be prouder of the work our team at Marchex has put in to making sure our solution is highly accurate, effective, and built for the success of our customers.

Since that post in GIGAOM, we’ve been featured in several other publications, and our competitors seemed to have noticed, even rebutting Mr. Ohlhorst’s product review in their own blog.

From our point of view, we’re not sure we have a true competitor in this space. Other technologies are really good at what they do, but for companies that drive phone calls to drive revenue or book appointments, Mr. Ohlhorst said it best when he said Marchex is, “setting the standard in speech analytics with their purpose-built technology.”

IBM recently published two concerns with comparisons of speech technology (such as Marchex and IBM Watson):

• For accurate comparison of systems, training and testing must be consistent
• Access to domain data is a critical factor in measuring performance

Let’s address each of these points individually.

IBM makes the argument that for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to be “truly comparable” both systems need to be “trained and tested on the same data”.This is not an accurate statement. Both IBM and Marchex offer an out-of-the-box US English narrowband (i.e. meant for telephony data) model. IBM claims that to compare accuracy we must test using a corpus called SWITCHBOARD.

SWITCHBOARD is a low diversity (543 speakers), limited content (309 hours), nonspontaneous (conversations are forced based on predefined topics), and antiquated (recorded originally in 1992, 25 years ago) corpus which will tell you ZERO about how a speech recognition system will perform in the wild. A more accurate methodology for testing two different systems is to take real, unseen conversations and submit them to both systems and measure how they perform.  This methodology was applied in the recent benchmark testing, performed by Frank Ohlhorst at GIGOM , which independently verified Marchex’s superior accuracy. Five hours of real, previously unseen, unfiltered conversations were submitted to both systems, and with this test, Marchex demonstrated a relative accuracy improvement of approximately 30 percent.

The second argument made by IBM implies that our ASR system has been pre-customized with inaccessible data. Once again, if you read the details of the study and our research paper, you will find no such pre-customization has been done. Marchex offers a standard US English telephony ASR model based on very large corpus of unbiased phone call data. We measured our generic model against IBM’s generic model with unseen data and the results are indisputable: Out-of-the-box, when looking at generic conversational data plainly shows Marchex’s ASR system is the better choice for you and your business.

So, where does that leave us?   IBM claims that you should only trust a test relying on an irrelevant data set that will give you zero indication of real world performance.  They also suggest that if you hand over all your data, spend time and resources customizing their software, only then can you build an equally accurate, if not better solution.  And, sure, that’s an option. The better option is an out-of-the-box solution that provides a level of accuracy that is unparalleled. A better option is one that saves you time and money associated with set-up and onboarding costs. A better option is one that is proven to work with your business, delivering unparalleled accuracy at a lower price point, designed for your needs.

When your business needs to understand not only what drove a customer to call, but what happened on that call, you need a solution designed for your needs. Marchex Speech Analytics is designed with your business in mind, with technology that allows you to analyze everything from products, services, and special promotions requested to missed opportunities. You want to convert more of your callers into customers, you want to target high-converting media channels, and you need to make sure that your phone agents are optimizing their time and always improving your customer’s experience. Marchex Speech Analytics is a solution built to accelerate your business, a solution designed for your needs.

IBM requires custom configurations to work for your company. That adds time, cost and complexity. Marchex is better because it was custom built for you, and works right out of the box. And Mr. Ohlhorst agrees.

Phone calls are a crucial part of doing business, from retaining customers to driving new revenue – but looking at what happens during these phone calls and measuring their outcomes at scale can be even more beneficial. Marchex Speech Analytics, our recently released, industry-leading solution can put that vast analytical power into the hands of your business. A recent study by the Marchex Institute analyzed over a million anonymized calls and discovered a clear correlation between being polite and the outcome of that phone call.

To fully explain our findings and to show how businesses just like yours can leverage the power of Marchex Speech Analytics to close more deals, optimize your media spend and improve your customer experience, we’d like to invite you to our latest webinar: Measuring Politeness: How Phone Calls Impact Your Business

Click Here to Register

Join us on Wednesday June 28^th for a free, live discussion about Speech Analytics and the correlation between politeness and closing more deals. Our featured speaker, Aaron Jansen – Franchise Business Consultant from Meineke will discuss how they have implemented Marchex Speech Analytics and the impact it has had on the business.

The live session will be held on June 28^th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. If you can’t make the live session, but would still like to learn more about how Marchex Speech Analytics can help drive more revenue for your business, register right now to have a recording of the session delivered to your inbox.

We hope to see you there, register today to reserve your seat.

In April, we launched Marchex Speech Analytics, an industry-leading solution for businesses who rely on inbound phone calls to drive sales and appointments. Representing the culmination of years of research and development, Marchex Speech Analytics allows your business to track, understand and optimize your digital marketing and phone performance with transcriptions, keyword spotting, automatic credit card number redaction and more.

Following the April launch of Marchex Speech Analytics, independent analyst, Frank Ohlhorst, put the product to test against IBM’s Watson. Overall, Speech Analytics fared incredibly well. Or as Frank puts it, “Marchex Speech Analytics schools IBM’s Watson in ASR comparison.”

For those that missed it, Frank published a full review of Marchex Speech Analytics on Gigaom last week, followed by Marchex’s official announcement in a press release on Thursday. We think Marchex Speech Analytics is pretty amazing, but you don’t have to take our word for it– check out what a few top influencers have to say:

MarTech Series
Provides a deep dive on Marchex Speech Analytics compared to Watson, including a slide show of dashboard images.

NetworkWorld
Highlighted as the “Product of the Week” in a reoccurring round-up of top tech news.

Marketing Watch
Touts that Marchex is “setting the industry standard in customer to business call analytics.”

MarTech Advisor
Reporter Shabana Arora gives a run-down of product test results from the Marchex perspective.

MediaPost
Influencer Laurie Sullivan nails down the nitty gritty, including background on gathering human transcription data and what it means.

In today’s fast-paced digital marketing environment, it’s never been more important to understand what programs are driving your calls, and how you can leverage phone opportunities to drive more sales. And now, you can, with Marchex Speech Analytics.

To find out more about Marchex Speech Analytics, or schedule a live demo, please contact us today

As more companies seek to align goals across the organization, where marketing’s responsibility ends and sales begins can start to blur. As the owners of the most, and probably best, customer data, marketing teams are being held accountable for metrics beyond the marketing qualified lead (MQL). Marketing can no longer deliver qualified leads and call it a day; more and more, teams are on the hook to prove that the budget spent resulted in higher revenue.

Why the Sales Ops Team May Hold the Key to Success

Streamlined company initiatives makes collaboration with sales and sales operations teams essential for achieving revenue goals. Marketing automation technology supports online efforts across sales and marketing teams, but for businesses that rely on phone calls to make revenue goals, sales operations teams or more specifically fulfillment teams are critical. Fulfillment teams including call center agents and retail store staff play a key role in revenue outcomes, so it’s important to understand how their efforts affect the bottom line.

How AI and Speech Analysis Can Make Call Centers Smarter

If your marketing goal is tied to the outcome of a store visit of a call, you probably want to know how well your marketing spend performed. Call tracking capabilities aren’t new, but now we can use the data for much more than attribution. In fact, speech analysis technology can uncover deep insights such as:

• Which high-intent words are most likely to convert to sales
•  Why some calls don’t convert
•  What real-time call volume look likes
•  How much successful and failed calls are impacting revenue

Large franchises with distributed call centers such as Meineke Car Care Centers use speech analytics for agent training. By improving the agent script, Meineke was able to maximize ROI.

Using Data to Optimize Customer Experience and Agent Performance

By analyzing large volumes of call content to find “high-intent” words - words most often heard on successful calls - agents can be trained to listen for these words coupled with campaign messages to detect customers with an intent to buy. Tailored scripts can support the agent inclosing the sale. And even better, the data can be analyzed to identify more customers like the buyer, so advertising can be optimized to reach that audience.

Analysis can also help call center leaders determine why some calls don’t convert. Agents can be trained to improve the outcome of a call. A recent Marchex Institute study of an automotive company call center found that customer service agents increased the likelihood of a sale on their calls by more than 20% when the call began with a pleasant greeting that thanked the customer for their business.

Data analysis to improve marketing ROI now goes beyond analyzing marketing data. For actionable plans that optimize your marketing spend by partnering with your fulfillment team, download our white paper, Converting a Caller into a Customer.

Chatbots, self-help wikis and live chat supports may sound like the new “must” for companies.

But…calls to business from smartphones will reach 162 billion by 2019.

Your business phone isn’t a remnant of the past. Allow me to illustrate this even further:

• Google’s official data suggests that 70% of mobile searchers dial up a business straight from search results.
• Over 61% of mobile searchers also admit that having an option to a call a business in their path to purchase is very important.
• Around 71% of Internet leads are wasted by business as it takes around 46 hours and 53 minutes (!!!) for a sales rep to pick up the phone and follow up.

Admit it.

You want your contact center or phone agents to generate more business and convert new leads into devoted customers, rather than alienate and irritate the prospects.

But you are a company with high staff turnover rates at the support department. Providing effective training and timely feedback to agents is challenging.

You current call analytics tool delivers some sorts of call tracking, recording, and transcription. Yet, leveraging that data for your digital marketing campaigns is a tough call (pun intended).

How Speech Analytics Can Benefit Both Sales And Marketing

Now imagine this instead.

What if you could have a full picture of what happens on an inbound phone call? No, not just the transcripts, but actionable, bite-size insights that would allow you to:

• Immediately spot missed sales opportunities during phone conversations.
• Identify top performing agents and jot down their wording.
• Analyze call conversions and generate up to 20% more sales.

That exactly what something like Marchex Speech Analytics can do for you.

Let’s dive in even further.

Reduce Operational and Training Costs

Speech analytics software pays for itself within as little as three months. Here’s how:

• You avoid counter-productive spendings such as manually going through call transcripts and recordings.
• Speech analytics software allows you to quickly identify the top performers among your agents and those struggling to meet their goals.
• Faster feedback means less missed sales opportunities and decreased customer attrition.
• Proven best practices from high converting conversations could be incorporated straight into the employee training program.
• In fact, the overall agent training time can be reduced, while its quality can be increased.

Natural Generation of More Sales Opportunities

The data captured during the call can be used to identify additional cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Or leveraged in a digital marketing campaigns to deliver a truly personalized offer for the client.

Additionally, our solution enables you to track which marketing channels bring you the most valuable calls.  Use this data to optimize your ad spending. Connecting the dots between online to offline channels becomes simple this way.

You optimize your marketing performance and deliver more qualified leads to the sales team, already equipped with the even more data to close the sale.

Streamlined and Consistent Customer Experience

Did you know that 74% of customers would switch to another brand after a poor phone experience?

You don’t want to lose business because your agents sound irrelevant or too pushy.

Again, speech analytics technology gives you some unfair advantages:

• Understand what went wrong during a call. Optimize the scripts, hold times and agents’ training to make sure the clients’ expectations are always met.
• Create lookalike audiences from calls with high purchase intent. Later this data can be applied to narrow down the exact segment of like-minded customers.
• Reduce the wait times as Clean Call ® will filter out all sorts of robo-calls to save your team time and sanity.

To learn more about Marchex speech analytics products and how they can benefit your business, contact us today.

We’ve spoken before about what an exciting time it is to be a marketer. While many of our traditional job duties remain, the position of marketing is evolving from getting the messaging out the door and in front of eyes, to really being able to parse data, to dive into it, and to report to the CEO and Finance and other key stakeholders in the company on the direct effect of marketing programs on sales. Add the hurdle of today’s customer journey zagging from online to offline, and many of today’s marketers could be outside of their natural comfort zone. Today, we’re going to make you a little more comfortable, and make these newer responsibilities just a little easier with the introduction of Marchex Speech Analytics.

Marchex Speech Analytics is going to be great for not only your marketing programs, but for your sales ops teams as well. More on that in a minute, but let’s tackle the marketing issue first. Marchex Speech Analytics, at it’s base, is going to give both enterprise and mid-market companies a complete understanding of customer experience. What do I mean by that? I mean you’re going to be able to take this product and understand not only what drove prospects to pick up the phone and call your business but also what key events happened during those calls. With this new data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to optimize your marketing programs to target audiences more likely to buy, which will provide a stronger and more complete ROI.

Imagine being able to walk into your monthly reporting session and say, with full certainty, that the money you spent on digital advertising drove a certain number of calls, and that a majority of those calls converted to customers. And then imagine that your sales team could use the exact same product to review call transcripts to spot conversion keywords and optimize phone agent performance. This is the new reality of what Marchex is bringing to the table with Marchex Speech Analytics - aiding both marketing and sales ops on the calls that drive your business.

It’s not just about the lead anymore, it’s about how that lead converted to a sale. Across teams, across channels, Marchex delivers industry-leading analytics that can empower your business to reach your audience, deliver the most relevant message, and convert more calls into sales.

To learn more about Marchex Speech Analytics please download a free copy of our latest whitepaper here

Customers are becoming more tech-savvy. Omnichannel consumers use every device and resource available to them throughout the shopping journey. With smartphone usage on the rise, customers don’t just fill out web forms, send emails or live-chat with brands; they call as well. And they’re calling in increasing numbers.

In fact, a study by advertising research and advisory firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that “annual calls to businesses from smartphones will reach 162 billion by 2019.”

No surprises there, considering that:

• A January 2017 report from the Pew Research Center found that 77% of Americans now own smartphones compared to 35% in 2011
• Worldwide, Strategy Analytics predicts that 44% of the global population will own smartphones in 2017, and by 2022, the penetration rate will further increase to 59%

Why customers call

Smartphones are aptly named. They’re smart, they’re useful, they can do a lot of things - take photos, record a video, remind you of birthdays and anniversaries you’re likely to forget, help you get from point A to point B, and a host of other uses. A Harris Interactive poll even found that they can save you up to 22 days of free time per year. Or in dollar terms, $12,000 in time-saving value.

But why do customers still use their smartphones to call instead of just email or submit a helpdesk request via an online form? Aren’t digital interactions supposedly more meaningful and efficient?

Below are four reasons:

1. Customers want their issues resolved fast, without jumping through hoops.

Email response times vary. Some people respond to emails in under an hour; some as fast as within two minutes. But according to email productivity software Boomerang, the average response time stands at 23 hours.

In contrast, the average wait time for a live chat session is an impressive 45 seconds in 2016, says LiveChat100. However, live chat is still written communication. Add in fat fingers typing on a small screen or a chat widget that isn’t optimized for mobile into the mix, and you have a problem.

When customers call, it’s generally because:

• There’s something they want quickly addressed, or
• A phone call is the communication method most convenient for them

 2. Customers want multiple ways to connect with a business.

Despite the various communication gateways you’ve made available for your customers, they may still call if they’re unable or unwilling to use digital contact methods. As such, it’s a huge disservice to your callers if you don’t afford them the same attention you give customers who would rather email or send you a tweet.

Calling customers can also alert you to problems on your site or social media channels. This enables you to act swiftly and accordingly, such as issue an advisory, fix the site’s broken links, alert your social media team of activity on the company’s page, delete a suspicious website plugin, and so on. 

3. Phone calls provide clarity.

There are simple situations some customers have trouble articulating. For example, an ISP customer I once spoke with in a previous customer service job called to report a “hijacking” on his computer. He was clearly distressed, and it was only several minutes later that I understood his predicament: His modem was reset and he needed help with his username and password.

It’s easier and less time-consuming to ask a complicated or multi-step question on the phone, such as customizing an order or attempting to understand a deal offer that includes certain restrictions.

4. Inbound phone calls make the online-to-offline path to purchase more seamless for customers.

Modern shoppers research online and buy offline (ROBO), a phenomenon digital marketing professionals also tag as “ROPO (research online, purchase offline),” “webrooming,” or “reverse showrooming.” Shoppers still want to touch and feel a product before purchasing. Not to mention that some deals are only available in brick-and-mortar stores.

Other shoppers browse in-store and then look online for options with the lowest cost. This, on the other hand, is known as “showrooming.”

Whichever shopping behavior they choose to adopt, phone calls ultimately help customers determine the options best suited for them.

Why phone call analytics is important for businesses

Now that we’ve established inbound phone calls aren’t going away anytime soon, the next course of action is to implement tracking tools to analyze your calls for insights that let you understand what makes the phone experience unique and valuable for the customer.

Customer experience directly influences business results, after all.

Analytics tools like Marchex Call Analytics carry features that measure call success, tie calls to marketing campaigns, determine what customer-facing representatives are doing right or wrong, and monitor how long customers are on hold, among others - all in the name of making the overall customer journey a painless and profitable one, one phone interaction at a time.

Final word

As long as the ability to make a phone call exists, phone lines will keep on ringing. As such, squeeze the most value out of inbound calls through tools that systematically analyze your calls for ways to make the customer experience more meaningful and memorable.

As a marketer, one of the most beneficial, and sometimes frustrating, exercises you can do is to pose as a shopper or better yet, listen in on your company’s phone reps to hear how your customer service agents handle incoming calls.

When things go right, telesales teams often get little recognition. When things go wrong, however, you can bet they hear about it. And yet, these agents represent the tie between true marketing ROI and the promised land of a new customer. It truly is the last mile of the marketing journey, and unfortunately for many marketers today, it’s the one you least control.

Think about it—you’ve found a target-rich environment of potential customers and through your award-winning YouTube video and your savvy social campaign and delivered them to your sales team’s front door. In many cases you have little to no access to your telesales agents and they may have little knowledge, interest, or alignment with your marketing and branding goals. As a marketer, you need to know more about the conversation—Did callers mentioning bundling? How often did calls reference your competitors in the conversation? Did they bring up the new product by name?

When faced with analyzing tens of thousands of calls conducted by your agents each month, you need two things as a marketer—speed and scale. You need to be able to quickly identify conversations that end in a sale so you can make sure agents are following best practices. You need to pinpoint and act on missed sales opportunities where a specific product or service was referenced. And you need to do all this while ensuring you’re adhering to the privacy and ethics standards that protect the caller and the agent alike. No small task!

In an effort to create more alignment between sales and marketing, more and more companies are turning to technology to tie a company’s marketing strategy to the conversation that took place on the phone with a prospect. These technology solutions not only help optimize the agents’ response to callers, they help the marketer drive more calls with high conversion potential to the agent. They do this by providing full transcripts and keyword spotting for every phone call without requiring a team of people to listen to thousands of recorded conversations.

Your task is to get the insight from these calls before your competition does. You need to pivot, double-down, or quickly modify your marketing and media plans to respond to what your prospects are saying and find more of them before the competition.

And that’s finally where the circle gets completed. When you can optimize agent performance; when you know what a successful call looks like and can model that across an entire team; and most importantly—when you can connect the person who picked up the phone and turned into a customer back to your marketing and media mix and optimize your spend, you’ve eliminated the blind spot and are primed to grow your business.

That’s the difference between simply marketing in modern times and truly becoming a Modern Marketer.

Let’s use a real example here. I normally browse Facebook on my laptop so I’m exposed to a lot of Facebook ads. I’ve also noticed their ad targeting is on point because I see things I’m interested in constantly – but rarely do I click those ads. What’s more common is that I’ll remember the brand or product later (either on my commute or before bed) and I’ll do a Google search. I usually end up clicking a paid ad and if I have questions or want to book an appointment I’ll make a phone call. Bridging this online to offline gap is where Marchex can help support your omnichannel strategy.

In the current world you’d be able to track all of the online actions – the display impression on Facebook, which paid search ad I viewed and what landing page I hit. But what happens when I take an offline action like making a phone call or going into a store? This is where Marchex comes in.

Marchex provides a single platform where you can quickly see which marketing activities are driving the most leads across every marketing channel. This enables you to achieve several game-changing outcomes:

• Reduce CPA across all channels
• Increase call conversion rates
• Optimize media spend to boost revenue

Using an “offline cookie” we’re able to match callers with online users who viewed or clicked an ad. This powerful matching capability can help you attribute display spend based on which customers have been influenced by a display ad and drive down your CPA.

Furthermore, we can help you understand what occurred on that phone call so you can optimize your media spend for “high intent” calls. Going beyond quantity of calls will help your team focus on which callers are most likely to convert so you can adjust your media spend accordingly.

Check out this video to learn more:

If you’re interested in finding out exatly how Marchex Omnichannel Analytics Cloud can assist your business, please join us for a free webinar on Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 10:00 am PST. This webinar will feature speakers from Facebook, Forrester and Marchex, and is designed for marketers just like you to understand how Marchex Omnichannel Analytics Cloud works for your business online and offline.

The other day, I came across a great article by Sophorn Chhay called 3 Mobile Marketing Essentials for Outstanding Lead Generation. The article brings up some really fantastic strategies designed to get down to the nitty gritty of what all marketers, mobile focused or not, are after: Leads.

Those sweet, sweet Glengarry leads

And while I’m not suggesting you put your coffee down until you’ve read the article, I do think that these three points are something mobile marketers need to keep in mind. The three tips covered in Sophorn’s piece are:

1. Consider Target Lifecycles
2. Use CTAs
3. Anticipate Preferences

I’ll let you read his full piece to get the details here, I want to talk about bridging the sum of all of these excellent tips into a phone call, after all, that is what we do here. For businesses who rely on phone calls as true test of marketing effectiveness, your CTA is chosen for you, you want them to click-to-call. As far as where they are in their lifecycle, you have a lot of options: research, comparison shopping, even half a step away from making a purchase. You have to have clear data on your calls and your customer’s journey. This is the best way to understand why they’re calling, when they’re calling and when they’re calling.

Perhaps most importantly, you need to have an omnichannel strategy in place. The customer journey is no longer a straight line from Point A to Point Z. They sidestep, they switch between devices, they see display ads, social ads, search ads. Having a clear view of all of your marketing programs, how they complement each other and which avenues drive the best results is paramount in getting the results that you, your managers and your business are looking for.

And what’s the best way to cover your omnichannel marketing? Stay tuned.

To find out more about how Marchex advertising technology can give you a clear view of call-based marketing programs, please contact us today.

Recently, Marchex added an Instant Live Chat feature to our website that connects visitors to a Marchex employee. By adding this feature, our goal was to meet the needs of visitors who needed a quick question answered, coordinate new sales, and serve as an introductory resource to Marchex products.

After several weeks of having chat live, we discovered the unexpected benefits of instantly connecting with customers.

1. International Customers

In our first couple weeks of chat, we realized that it is an excellent avenue to connect with international companies. Time differences between companies can be a huge inhibitor to growing in international markets because the communication process is so long. We found that installing Chat has enabled us to have more interactions with international companies and have more detailed conversations than we could by exchanging emails back and forth.

2. Deal Velocity

Not only does chat generate additional sales leads, but we have also found that leads that come through chat tend to close quicker. This could be for a variety of reasons, but the main takeaway is that people who reach out via chat have a greater sense of urgency than those who engage with web content.

3. Efficiency

By using chat, both the website visitor and the chat agent have additional time to ask or answer questions. While it may only be a few seconds extra, this allows for a more efficient conversation that can lead to better answers regarding products and better responses surrounding a company’s needs. By integrating within our CRM, we are also able to attach chat transcripts to a contact record to give the account owner full visibility into their customer’s needs.

Have you considered adding chat to your website? It’s important for every company to make the customer experience as easy and pleasant as possible. We’re partial to the solution we went with, but there are literally hundreds of Live Chat Widgets out there for your to find the best fit for your website and business. Try out our chat widget today (located on the right side of your screen) if you are interested in learning more about our product offerings!

All GIFs via GIPHY

Today will be a quick update to my previous blog post on June 1^st of this year regarding the limitations of Google’s free tracking lines. This round of updates seems to be geared primarily towards understanding more about call conversions rather than relying solely on pure call volume. This shift is definitely reflective of where the call analytics industry is heading overall, here we go:

Import conversion data directly into AdWords

First off Google has added one huge benefit to their tracking capabilities, namely the option to import call conversions directly into AdWords. This is great news for anyone looking to complete the full attribution to revenue picture. There is a specific format this conversion data must embody in order to be consumed by Google – details here. Another caveat is that you must be using Google Forwarding Numbers in order to take advantage of this. For example, you cannot import conversions from calls placed on tracking lines from third party providers like Marchex.

Pictured: Trying to import 3rd-Party tracking lines into Google

Conversion indicator: minimum call duration – There is now an option to set a minimum call duration for counting a call as a conversion.

Additional call data

Google has recognized that marketers are demanding more information about what types of calls their ads are driving. To that end, they’ve added a few additional details to their call metrics:

• Status (missed or received)
• Caller Area Code
• Call Type

Again focusing on identifying conversions, you can now sort your calls by “Status”, i.e. missed or received calls. Diving into the reasons why so many C2B calls are “missed” is one of the top reasons people invest in call tracking. Part of that picture is understanding if callers simply went to voicemail after hours, or if they were transferred or put on hold and then abandoned, or if the phone simply just rang and rang. All of these call outcomes could affect your marketing and business strategies.

Additionally, while “Caller Area Code” can help you do some geo-targeting analysis, why doesn’t Google just display the caller ID? Every phone company in the USA provides this at no cost to anyone paying for a phone line.

Lastly, the purpose of the “Call Type” field is to help marketers understand the way in which their customers are calling them. There are several possible outcomes here: “manually dialed”, “mobile click-to-call” or “unknown”.

In summary, all of the limitations I previously discussed in my last blog post are still present with these updates. Overall these changes will improve the SMB marketer’s ability to keep track of what types of calls they are receiving from their investment in AdWords, however Enterprise level brands will command more granularity of data and flexibility in reporting.

All GIFs via GIPHY

Coming at you – LIVE!

Earlier this year BIA/Kelsey released a new Call Commerce report on the importance of phone calls and how it is now impacting the bottom line. What’s even more interesting is that in the report they estimated click-to-call influences more than $1 trillion in U.S. consumer trending—talk about an opportunity companies can take advantage of!

The rise of mobile has catapulted the demand for click-to-call with the smartphone now in a position to drive monetary impact on consumer spending. Mike Boland, the author of the report, and I will be hosting an interactive video discussion where we will talk about the future of phone calls and how you can leverage technology to help understand your calls and your customers.

Join the conversation Wednesday, November 16^th at 11am PST/2pm EST.

Speakers:

Mike Boland, Chief Analyst & VP, Content

BIA/Kelsey

John Busby

SVP, Marchex Institute

Marchex

If you cannot attend the live session, please register anyway to receive a recording of this live event