Last time we covered tracking phone numbers to test the efficacy of your different marketing initiatives. Today we’ll expand on that and make it more online focused. With so many businesses having strong online presence it’s amazing how few companies consider phone metrics in their measurement of success. They do so to their own detriment!
A telephone system for small office budgets doesn’t mean you still can’t play with the big boys. Telephone system call accounting software allows you to monitor and report on customers that contact various marketing numbers you provide them. On a website this means you can have different phone numbers on different CTA or webpages. You’ll know for certain what page made your online customer pick up the phone.
The first tenant of online is to split test, split test again, then split test some more. There is multivariate testing as well as straight A/B testing. Today we’re focusing on A/B tests. This is where you have one version of a page, then test it against another version you have of the same page. The tests are conducted real time and different options are presented randomly, yet equally distributed, to different site visitors.
So where does a telephone system for a small office come into play? If you’re ecommerce only then it doesn’t. But if you still receive phone calls in addition to online sales then it’s very relevant. Let’s say version “A” of your split test actually encourages users to pick up the phone. This might be a side effect you hadn’t counted on. If you were only tracking ecommerce conversion rates then this “A” version might have lost easily. If you tracked both ecommerce and telephone calls this “A” version could have won convincingly. This is why data is only as good as the inputs you provide.
A modern telephone system for small office marketing can be a game changer. In addition to A/B variate testing you simply need to include different phone numbers also. If you have your own developers you can take this a step further and actually cookie users to present the phone number you want across all pages of the site. When an online user arrives and is presented with the “A” version of the split test they will see only one telephone number across the entire site. If another user arrives at the “B” version they will be presented with a completely different phone number.
A telephone system for small office marketing needs is incredibly affordable. You can employ call accounting and number tracking technology for very little expense. When you consider the implications by adding this extra dimension to your marketing analysis it’s a very small price to end up with accurate statistics.
As a parting note please think about this simple implication for all you SEM lovers out there……How do you know if your most expensive keywords for SEM are converting over the phone and not just online? If you don’t you could be turning off keywords that actually deliver a positive ROI! That’s why you should call us about a telephone system for your small office and start tracking those phone numbers and calls!
