Identifying Call Sources to track (Step 2/7)

September 17, 2018 | Jason Kay

Calls that come into your organization will come from all kinds of sources – online, offline, business partners. It’s important that each of these are considered when designing your caller journey. What will the caller’s mood be? Will they have already started a conversation and be looking to continue it on the phone? What is the likely context in which they would be viewing one source versus another when they call?

 

When thinking about call source tracking for your caller journeys, it’s tempting to say “let’s just track everything”. However, if your journey is for a marketing campaign, the sources may just be the activities you are spending money and effort on to drive traffic to your sales team.  If it’s a sales effort, focus on the fact that leads are coming from email signatures, contact forms, or perhaps voicemails left behind. Marketers and agencies spend a lot of time tracking their efforts and spend, but when the resulting action by the prospect is a phone call – it’s important to identify and track where that call came from.

How to use the Call Sources section of the Caller Journey Worksheet

Call sources are any of the places that phone numbers are presented to allow your contacts, prospects and customers to call you and are the partners and systems that may transfer calls to your organization. Calls are initiated either by a person dialing the number or by a programmatic trigger from an action online. Consider all the sources that will lead to calls into your caller journey as you work through this section:

Online Sources

List the digital sources that are presented in tandem with HTML you have control over: Web pages, landing pages, mobile pages and apps, chatbots, AI bots. Online sources enable you to go deeper with both data integrations, and with following callers across your multiple channels before they get on the phone. Online allows you to display phone numbers to your contacts or enable calls to be initiated by a call-to-action such as a button (often referred to as click-to-call).

Add the relevant online sources that drive phone calls into the caller journey. Be sure to note how the source will trigger the call. For example, will it be a number that is dialed or will an interaction on your website trigger the call. Examples of Online Sources include: 

  • Web pages (include domain) + number in banner
  • Mobile pages + Button to “call now”
  • Landing pages (and which ads are they coming from ads or efforts are they coming from)
  • White-paper download form – call when they submit a form

Offline

Offline sources are those that do not have the ability to interact with your phone numbers. Traditionally these are the numbers you see presented on direct mail, signage, and business cards. Offline, in the caller journey sense, may also be digital in those scenarios where you have no control over the placed number when it’s presented to a contact. Email signatures, newsletters, online ads with a phone number as a call to action (vs landing page).  All these may trigger different experiences in your caller journeys as well, so be sure to think about where callers should find your number across your offline channels.

Transfer

If you work with partners or affiliates who send you leads, be sure to include these as call sources. They too can provide data and insight into your caller’s journey.

Other

New channels, apps, and services are being released every day into the Martech Landscape. Add any other channels driving calls into your campaign so they are considered in the following on stages of your Caller Journey planning.

Great work capturing all the sources of your calls, next let’s look at how data needs to flow from, and onto, calls when contacts dial in.

Next: Managing Data when the Call Starts

Retreaver is a call tagging, tracking and routing service that enables marketers to do more with customer data on their phone calls and track all the online and offline sources they use. To learn more visit retreaver.com or call us at 1-866-834-4880.