How on earth can a telephone system assist with marketing? It may seem silly but you can use your telephone system for small business to track callers and calculate which marketing initiatives are actually working.
We’ve successfully used phone number tracking and split testing as part of our marketing strategy for years as have many successful sales companies we’ve spoken to. The premise is very simple. If all your marketing is pointing at the same phone number then how can you be expected to accurately measure which marketing program customers are calling for?
At a basic level you can ask customers how they heard about you and track the data. Unfortunately this information is often skewed by staff forgetting to ask, and customers making anything up. We know because our own phone number testing yielded different results from asking.
Telephone systems for small business can alleviate the “grey” and provide you with definitive results which exactly what you want. It works like this:
Step 1. Provide a different phone number for each of your marketing initiatives. Providing you have direct in dial capabilities you should have plenty of spare numbers to choose from.
Step 2. We program the telephone system so that each of these unique phone numbers has a corresponding answering point. With modern telephone systems for small business, you can even have unique greetings and messages for each of the programs you set up.
Step 3. You need a measurement device, like basic call accounting software, that tracks inbound call numbers on a phone number basis.
Step 4. Watch the results.
Here’s an example of how telephone systems for small business work in a practical sense to calculate marketing ROI.
Let’s say for example a new marketing program costs $1000 and you make an average 20% margin on your products. Then you would need to sell $5000 worth of product to just breakeven. The next part assumes you have a pre-existing notion of what your phone opportunity to conversion rate actually is. So let’s say for every 10 phone calls you convert 2 opportunities into sales. And each sale has a net value of $500.
You therefore need to sell 10 products to breakeven. That’s the equivalent of 50 calls based on 2 sales per 10 opportunities. So now you know the number you need to monitor to see if that marketing program is actually viable. Telephone systems for small business can be powerful marketing tools if used correctly. So much marketing is fluff and without carefully monitoring results you can easily throw money away. This type of technology is easy to set up, inexpensive and simple to report on. If you’re serious about marketing and how you spend your hard earned dollars then you should also get serious about phone number tracking on your telephone system for small business. Anything else is simply sticking your finger in the air and guessing.
Speak to one of our experts and see how you can implement a solution like this. Next post we’ll cover another element of this in Split testing phone numbers for online.
