Dial Into ROI: A Guide To Offline Attribution & Call Tracking

Businesses still rely on phone calls to drive higher conversion rates, better profit margins and stronger customer relationships. However, the difficulty lies in effectively linking these positive outcomes to marketing efforts, particularly when it comes to offline marketing campaigns and initiatives.

Offline marketing channels, such as print ads or direct mailers, can be challenging to track and attribute to specific sales and revenue. Without a clear understanding of how these offline touchpoints influence customer behavior and purchasing decisions, businesses struggle to optimize their marketing strategies and investments.

While digital channels dominate modern marketing, phone calls remain a vital and often underutilized touchpoint when effectively integrated and tracked within a comprehensive multi-channel marketing strategy. To capitalize on this opportunity, businesses must master the art of offline attribution and call tracking to demonstrate the ROI of their marketing efforts.

By implementing robust call tracking solutions and data-driven attribution models, organizations can gain valuable insights into the impact of their offline marketing activities on customer engagement and revenue generation. This knowledge can then be used to refine their marketing mix, allocate resources more effectively and ultimately drive better returns on their investment.

The Unique Benefits Of A Phone Call

Phone calls are a way for service agents to provide personalized service, which leads to longer-lasting customer relationships. This personal touch is especially important in industries where trust is critical, such as healthcare or legal services. Beyond receiving tailored, personalized service, customers who pick up the phone to make a call often demonstrate a stronger intent to purchase or engage with your services — in fact, leads generated through phone inquiries tend to have higher conversion rates than those originating from digital channels.

A call also gives your team the chance to have more in-depth discussions about products and services, which can lead to successful upselling or cross-selling. Additionally, engaging in real-time means quicker resolutions to issues callers may have. Reps can steer customers through the decision-making process to help them make the best choice for them.

Successful Strategies For Offline Marketing

Understanding phone calls’ impact on business outcomes helps prove their value in your marketing mix. By implementing tracking and attribution systems, you can gain clear visibility into how phone interactions contribute to your overall marketing success and ROI. Here are some top tips:

Invest In Robust Call-Tracking Software

This technology can record and analyze call data to give you invaluable insights into conversation details like call duration, frequency and outcomes. This information can help you refine your marketing strategies. Further, software that integrates AI capabilities can make the follow-up process more efficient and find ways to improve customer satisfaction through call analysis.

Leverage Unique Phone Numbers

Assigning custom phone numbers to campaigns can ease the tracking process by allowing you to definitively link calls to the specific campaigns that included that phone number.

Use Different Promotional Codes For Different Campaigns

Similar to assigning unique phone numbers to campaigns, using unique promo codes will help you attribute which campaigns are driving the most engagement.

Bake Attribution Questions Into Scripts

When training your team, it’s crucial to drive home the importance of asking callers how they heard about your company. Simply ensuring teams ask this question for every caller will give you valuable attribution data that can drive future campaigns.

Connect Call Tracking To Your CRM

Integrate your call tracking system with your CRM to get a holistic view of the entire customer journey, better understand the role of phone calls in sales and determine the touchpoints that resulted in conversions.

These tips can help inform your offline marketing strategies and deliver tangible results. Moreover, keep your messaging consistent across channels, make phone numbers clickable on online pages to make calling easy directly from mobile channels and constantly test the effectiveness of different CTAs or phone number placements.

The impact and importance of phone calls can’t be forgotten, even in our digital-first world. They’re a valuable tool in a multichannel marketing strategy, and robust call tracking and attribution solutions will yield untapped insights, boost ROI and, critically, improve customer experiences.

Andrew Clark is a digital marketing professional with ten years of experience both in the U.S. and Qatar, working both in-house and for various agencies. Over his professional career, he handled numerous initiatives, including paid and organic search marketing, paid and organic social media and public relations. As CallTrackingMetrics’ SEO Content Strategist, Clark leverages his prior experiences and academic background in the humanities to develop and manage the companies’ organic marketing efforts.