How to Grow Your Agency with Call Tracking & Analytics

Most marketing agencies are overlooking a key element for their clients’ success: Their phone lines.

Modern-day digital marketers are practically obsessed with optimizing for the customer’s journey, and it’s no wonder. Today, fully 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services.

We talk often in the marketing world above optimizing various consumer touchpoints — improving landing pages, making the website a seamless experience, improving email engagement.

But how do you optimize the experience motivated prospects are having with your frontline staff over the phone?

This is an essential point of optimization for local businesses and the agencies that serve them.

Medical clinics and dental offices, home and commercial contractors, veterinarians and other pet services providers, and real estate agents are just a few of the types of businesses that can use call tracking and analytics to grow their business.

But all call tracking solutions are not created equally. What should you be looking for in a robust phone calls solution to support your local marketing strategy?

Optimizing Phone Interactions Beyond Call Tracking

Call tracking is changing and as it’s become more effective, it has also become more accessible and affordable for smaller businesses.

As a baseline, you should be looking for a solution that offers more than call tracking alone. Knowing where the call came from is important, but so too is deepening your understanding of that caller’s experience with your business.

For small to medium-sized businesses, these qualities are important in a call tracking and analytics solution:

• Easy to set up and easy to use.
• Shows us who is calling and where calls are coming from, whether it’s digital (e.g., websites, ads) or print (e.g., flyers, billboards, mailers).
• Allows us to measure the results of our marketing efforts, whether in-house or agency-side.
• Lets us ensure phone-answering staff is communicating effectively.
• Helps increase their ROI when it comes to local marketing.

Informing Your Marketing Strategy & Increasing Local Success

Call tracking and analytics enable local businesses and their agencies to take their marketing strategy one step further; to go beyond the traditional digital marketing efforts that drive traffic to a website.

Immediately upon implementing call tracking, you have a clear view into:

• Where calls are coming from.
• Who calls are coming from.
• On what day calls are coming in.
• At what time calls are coming in.
• What devices consumers are using.

This data helps businesses understand more about their audience, measure ad campaign performance, and allocate future budge to the best channels.

Taking it further and optimizing for the customer experience means deepening your understanding of your customers’ conversion funnel from start to end.

Another way businesses use call tracking analytics is to compare the types of patients who are calling with the patients who follow through with an appointment. This insight enables you to refine your marketing strategy to increase conversion rates.

The Best Marketing Only Works If The Phones Are Answered Correctly

If you are putting everything into the best marketing you can afford, using all of the best marketing tools and strategies, but someone calls the practice only to be put off by an employee’s etiquette, your marketing becomes essentially irrelevant to that potential customer.

It no longer matters if they saw your ads, loved your website, or were touched by a patient testimonial video. They have now had a personal experience with your business, and it wasn’t a good one.

If ads are performing well and the practice is getting calls but not conversions, a holistic call tracking and analytics solution can quickly determine what another potential problem could be, and that is often either:

• Front-desk staff communication quality.
• Calls going unanswered.
• Or, a technical issue with a phone line at that location.

Call Recording = Quality Control

Call recording gives you a key lever for quality control. It allows you to monitor the communication of front desk or customer service staff with existing and potential clients, patients, or customers.

Sometimes these insights are surprising, as business owners don’t realize that the people answering their phones are deterring callers from making an appointment.

Pain-Free Dental Marketing is an agency that prides itself on its data-driven approach to local marketing strategy for dental practices. We asked founder Andre Santos to share an example of how CallRail is used by his agency to support clients’ business and local marketing goals.

“CallRail is a secret weapon… It’s one of our best marketing tools,” Andre explained. “There’s no guessing; the data is right there. CallRail’s reports present the data in a user-friendly manner – not only for us – but for us to present to our clients.”

Andre shared some common errors his team is able to identify in reviewing telephonic interactions with patients/potential patients for his clients:

• Not answering the phone after the first or second ring.
• Failing to mention their name and/or the practice’s name.
• Not asking the patient their name and/or not using it.
• Placing a person on hold before asking them if it’s fine.
• Placing the person on hold for too long.
• A lack of friendliness.
• A lack of knowledge regarding services/or an unwillingness to obtain said unknown information.
• Not asking the person how they heard about the practice.”

Andre added that if his agency identified any of the above problems with a particular staff member or two, they could then provide the dentist/practice owner a report they could use to constructively advise staff to improve on said issues.

Call Tracking & Analytics in Action

Andre also shared a real-world use case that demonstrates the power of call tracking and analytics in local marketing.

“In January 2021, after analyzing our performance indicator and noticing their revenue for that month was up, we were able to determine that Aurentz Family Dental had indeed had a really good month,” Andre said. “Once we pulled their numbers and noticed the increase in new patients as well as profit, we wanted to know why.”

How We Discovered What Marketing Was Working Best For Aurentz Family Dental

“We started by logging into CallRail where we could view a monthly report and see that their first-time call numbers were up. That month, they had a total of 51 first-time callers. Naturally, the next data set we wanted to observe is where those calls were coming from,” he said.

Next, his team analyzes the CallRail “Call Attribution” report and identified that a large majority of those first-time callers that month came from their Google Ads extension as well as their website number pool.

“We saw that their Google Organic numbers were up, which told us that their SEO was performing exactly how we wanted it to,” he explained.

In addition, Andre’s team was able to interpret from the various reports that the number of callers from the tracking number on his client’s print ads was quite low.

“This information tells us that we will likely see better results and higher new-patients numbers in the future if we implement more of the marketing budget into their Google Ads and less into their print ads,” he noted.

The Best Marketing Is Executed with a Holistic Approach

If you don’t have all the data, you can’t operate efficiently.

And if you can’t understand all the data, you can’t operate successfully.

Finally, if you can’t adjust your strategy from the data, you cannot grow as an agency or a business.

Successful local marketing requires a 3-D view of the patient conversion funnel, and that requires a direct line of sight into the experiences your prospective customers or patients are having when they convert to business phone calls.

Want to learn more about what call tracking can do for your business? Try CallRail for free.