Inbound Phone Calls Rise Again as Sales Channel, Challenging Marketers That Track ROI Elsewhere
The ubiquity of smartphones is invigorating a sales channel that some marketers had begun to neglect: a ringing phone.
For marketers reliant upon leads or selling high-consideration products that benefit from conversations with prospective buyers, the development means that simply measuring digital interactions is not enough. They need to measure phone calls.
The test-prep tutoring firm Sylvan, for example, spends most of its national media budget on digital, particularly search engine marketing. But potential customers who follow its search ads to its site have increasingly made a phone call the next step instead of completing a web form. Because the company had been gauging campaign and keyword effectiveness by tracking things like the number of web forms filled out, the shift was leaving Sylvan blind to much of the return on its investment.
