Probably the most important metric of all for any Marketing Department is tracking advertising ROI.
They want to know if money spent on Social Media ads, Google ads, or any other ads for that matter, is generating sales. To get the true ROI they need to track how much was spent on each advertising medium and how many sales were generated by each media.
For online product sales, this is fairly easy to track. A special code called an Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is added to links to track traffic sources of every sale. For offline sales, however, it can be quite challenging. For example, a consumer might see a social media ad, but instead of clicking through and buying online, they click the business’ phone number and reach the contact centre to ask a few questions. If they buy while on the call, this can be tracked back to the relevant ad campaign. But if they don’t buy then, and later visit the brand’s physical store to buy – how is this sale tracked?
Phone tracking and integrated data
It’s all to do with phone data.
Here’s how instore sales can be tracked back to the relevant advertising campaign.
The initial call
- From clicking on the ad, when the customer decides to call the company’s Contact Centre, their phone number is automatically displayed to the Customer Service Representative (CSR) in their desktop. We integrate the company’s CRM system with our Premier Contact Point solution so that all historical customer information is screen-popped immediately for the CSR to review details, or add them if they’re a new caller.
- At the same time, if the Marketing Department is using call tracking software, the campaign they clicked on to call and their phone number can also be stored in the CRM and a point-of-sale platform. Often marketers will use unique phone numbers for each medium.
Marrying up the data
Even retailers who don’t logically have a reason to request your phone number have found innovative ways to obtain it – eg: for confirming delivery or a booking, as a method of adding you to their Loyalty Club, or to entice you with a discount coupon sent by SMS.
Here’s where it gets clever.
The customer’s journey is effectively tracked through their phone number:
- It’s captured right from their click on the ad to view the offer and make the call
- It’s captured in the Contact Centre
- It’s captured at point of sale
That purchase/transaction can then be tracked or linked back to the specific ad they viewed through the data stored in the CRM or POS platform. This gives marketers the ability to track ROI of all their different ad mediums and campaigns.
Marketing magazine B&T provided this example in the article “How to Track the Effectiveness of Social Media Advertising on In-Store Sales”.
“.. a retail-based finance company was concerned their social media spend was not delivering the returns they wanted and were planning to shift that money into channels which they could more effectively monitor and measure return on investment. As a consumer’s phone number is required to be given when making a transaction, call tracking was used to track the customers who had made an initial call after clicking or viewing an ad for the finance company on social media and then completed the transaction at one of its retail locations. Far from being ineffective, social ads were found to be driving, on average, five per cent of in-store sales and, for the first time, were able to be measured.”
More uses for the data
The Premier Contact Point Report Manager module is built on Microsoft Power BI, the most highly-rated Business Insight tool in the Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant’. Preconfigured BI dashboards can be accessed out of the box, and new dashboards can be easily created to report on contact centre data as well other data sets from across the organisation.
Data Analytics is also useful for a myriad of other purposes besides tracking advertising ROI.
For example:
1. If an ad for an online purchase generated a significant increase in calls to the Contact Centre, analyse the calls to gain insights into why.
- Were people having difficulty buying online, and if so why? Was there a website or payment processing malfunction?
- Was something in the ad or the sales page ambiguous or unclear, causing confusion? Your customers’ perception of what you are offering is the right one. If your intent is different, you need to fix it, because it’s being misunderstood.
2. If an ad that was intended to stimulate instore purchases instead resulted in a significant increase in calls to the Contact Centre, you need to understand why.
- How many callers were from areas where there are no nearby store locations? Could you offer these callers an online purchasing option? Could you stop showing the ads to people in these areas?
- Did stores run out of stock and customers were calling to check stock levels in other locations or to place an order over the phone?
3. If the ad campaign provided the option to place a phone order – how did that work out?
- What was the ROI from phone sales for each ad?
- What was the conversion rate from all inbound calls responding to the ads? Which team members performed the best; who needs some sales coaching?
- What was the abandoned call rate to your inbound sales line during the promotional period? Did you have enough staff rostered on to cope? Are you offering Call Back to callers in queue so they don’t have to wait? (A great way to lift your conversion rates!)
Using big data to measure ROI and operational performance arms you with predictive capabilities.
This means that for your next campaign, the marketers know which ads to run, where to run them, who to target them to, and how much stock to have available. Your contact centre team can be properly scheduled to meet expected demand and implement processes and self-service options to maximise sales conversions.
When your Marketing and Contact Centre teams work together and have the right technology, integrated data, and powerful insights and analytics tools – this is when your campaigns can be accurately tracked, measured, and improved.
Powerful, Flexible Insights for Marketing Analysis
Premier Contact Point makes tracking progress, displaying KPIs, and planning for the future easy. Contact us to set up an obligation-free demo on how our simple-to-use, customisable BI reports can help you analyse marketing and conversion stats to help you plan your future campaigns and operations.
