How Call Tracking Can Make or Break Your Next Marketing Campaign

It's come to my attention that you may not be tracking your business fully, and therefore are missing many good marketing and advertising opportunities.

By fully tracking I mean tracking all calls that come into your call center, especially all campaign-related calls. There are simple, inexpensive online tools that enable you to track your service calls.

Recently I had a conference call with a client of mine and a well-known magazine publishing group. I told the rep that he needed to prove our results in order for us to expand our campaign with his publication. I mentioned call tracking to the rep and he wasn't aware of this service. As a marketer, I want my clients to know every call that a campaign generates in order to justify my existence. I assumed the ad rep would have too.

I started out in ad sales back in the day. I would have killed to be able to call up a client and hear them say, "we just looked at the call reports and saw that we got a ton of calls from that campaign." Instead, I used to hear, "well, nobody mentioned the ad when they came in, so I guess the campaign bombed." (I learned pretty quickly about coupons, promo codes and tracking sheets, pre-database marketing that is.)

The bottom line is that every company should use call-tracking software. It's really easy. Do a Google search for call tracking and dozens of companies come up. Personally, I use Kall8, but only because that's the one I first learned about and am used to.

What can call tracking do for you? Here are four benefits:

1. Allow you to see all of your call activity online. You know when calls came in, the caller ID if available, and can drill down into data such as city, state, county, ZIP code, etc.