What advertising is the most effective – we analyze not only “online conversions”
Posted: Thu Dec 26, 2024 3:49 am
Content
The Importance of the Telephone Sales Channel
Efficiency of Russian companies in call processing
How to determine which type of advertising is most effective
Not every internet marketer understands how important offline conversion (calls) analysis is to determine which advertising is more effective. This is not surprising: after all, the concept of "internet marketing effectiveness" is primarily associated with "online conversions" - that is, with what happens on the site, and not outside of it.
But ignoring "offline conversions" is unforgivable, because more than iran phone numbers half of the visitors to the average commercial site prefer to "convert" (make purchases, orders) by phone! And the percentage of such conversions, thanks to the widespread use of smartphones and the improvement of mobile search technologies, will only grow!
Average percentage of orders that website visitors place using a phone
Calls are the most important sales channel for any public company. More than half of the orders for the average company come by phone! But due to the inability to work with this channel, we often lose a lot in conversion - and we don’t even suspect it!
There are three factors to blame for this:
Lack of information about what advertising is most effective. Often we do not realize how important the telephone sales channel really is.
Misconceptions that the “telephone sales channel” is very difficult or even impossible to analyze and optimize.
It is not clear what and how to do. There is very little information about optimizing the "telephone sales channel" in the public domain. The usual tools of an Internet marketer (Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica) do not have the ability to analyze and optimize the "telephone sales channel".
Don't waste your advertising budget
The call tracking and end-to-end analytics service will show the effectiveness of each source in terms of “from click to sale”.
Get a consultation
The Importance of the Telephone Sales Channel
The lack of information about the importance of the telephone sales channel can be easily filled by answering the question: "Which advertising is more effective?", if we turn to the data of several studies recently conducted by several of the largest players in the Internet advertising market. These studies clearly show several modern trends related to the telephone sales channel:
1) More and more mobile devices - more and more calls:
64% of smartphone owners use their phones for online shopping;
55% of searches from smartphones end in conversion (a call, an order on the website, or a visit to an offline store);
visitors who access websites from mobile devices call almost twice as often as “regular” ones;
The volume of visits to websites from smartphones will exceed the volume of “regular” visitors in 2015.
2) Visitors want to call:
53% of shoppers cite lack of human interaction as the main reason for not shopping online;
63% of online shoppers research products on the website but place their orders over the phone.
3) The telephone sales channel has the highest conversion rate:
30% is the average conversion rate of a phone call into a customer;
61% of companies cite the telephone sales channel as “the highest quality and most important source of customers.”
It is obvious that people will continue to use mobile devices for web surfing, and the share of calls compared to other communication channels, including online orders, will continue to grow. Considering that the telephone channel is the highest quality and highly convertible (and this statement is the opinion of 2/3 of the representatives of the companies that took part in the survey), the analysis and increase of conversion of this channel should be the main task of Internet marketers. Do marketers understand this? And if they understand, what do they do to increase the effectiveness of the telephone sales channel?
Efficiency of Russian companies in call processing
The study, conducted jointly by UIS and CoMagic, aimed to collect information on how effectively Russian companies are able to "handle" their telephone sales channels. The study involved 1,000 companies from 8 different business sectors. All these companies placed ads in Yandex.Direct for queries related to their field of activity, with a cost of one click from $2 to $20. During the study, in order to identify the most effective advertising , 2 calls were made to each company (during the daytime and in the early evening) and several control questions were asked about the product or service offered by each specific company. The following results were obtained as a result of the study:
In 24% of companies, the call was not answered at all (they did not pick up the phone within 60 seconds or the signal was "busy" twice in a row). This figure shows that many Russian companies do not have a call service culture at all. Problems with "failed calls" or "busy" signals are easily solved with the help of modern "Virtual PBX" services , which allow flexible configuration of the call service scenario (for example, if the call center is overloaded, temporarily redirect calls to other departments of the company or redirect calls to the mobile phone of the duty officer if for some reason the phone is not picked up in the office).
Considering that the cost of one missed call due to advertising is approximately equal to the monthly cost of using the Virtual PBX service, such a large number of companies that are difficult to reach can only be explained by the lack of awareness among advertising companies about the capabilities of modern cloud PBXs.
When the phone was picked up, in 47% of cases the wait for the operator to answer took more than 20 seconds. According to a survey of online store visitors, 20 seconds is the critical mark, beyond which the visitor is usually not prepared to wait for an answer. And indeed, few visitors will patiently wait for an answer to a call for more than 20 seconds if there are always several competing sites at hand.
In 18% of the companies with which we spoke, we were unable to answer the question about the product/service offered and avoided the conversation under various pretexts. Among the most common responses were:
Call back later (in half an hour/hour/tomorrow) and you will receive an answer.
Leave your phone number and we will call you back.
We can't help you in any way / there's no one to consult.
All these answers, taking into account that the buyer wants to receive advice on the product/service “here and now” and does not intend to wait given the wide choice of competing suppliers, lead to only one thing – such companies lose customers.
In 55% of cases, when the conversation with the operator took place, it was noted that the company lacked any sales algorithm or conversation script (it was very easy to understand: any conversation script between a salesperson and a potential client begins with the introduction of the salesperson). The absence of a telephone conversation script as a sales algorithm leads to the fact that salespeople communicate with potential clients chaotically, “as God puts it into their hearts,” and this, naturally, leads to a significant decrease in the conversion of the telephone sales channel.
As a result, the researchers came to the conclusion that at the current moment, with more effective advertising, due to the lack of analysis and building an effective work of the telephone sales channel, the average company loses up to two orders out of three! Think about this figure: almost any company could easily increase the conversion of the telephone sales channel more than twice, having realized and started to solve the above problems!
But it turns out to be a vicious circle. Companies that do not monitor and analyze the effectiveness of advertising and the telephone sales channel simply do not have information that they have problems (and often about the enormous scale of these problems). In a false calm, such companies do not even try to use tools for analyzing the telephone sales channel, being sure that there are no problems (or completely overlooking the enormous importance of this channel, assessing the effectiveness of advertising types). But statistics stubbornly say the opposite!
[INSERT] From conversations with online store owners about the importance of the telephone sales channel:
"Answering calls is a pain in the ass! Now I have written on the website "Orders are accepted only through the website. Questions can be asked by email""
"They gave a 3% discount on orders placed on the website. Now they call and demand a discount over the phone, and if we ask to place an order on the website, they start to get indignant"
There is a solution!
And there really is a solution. But given that the above-described problem of increasing the effectiveness of advertising and the telephone sales channel is complex, the solution to this problem should also be complex, taking into account all possible reasons for the "conversion leak". Below are several standard and proven methods that will allow you to take full control of the telephone sales channel.
The Importance of the Telephone Sales Channel
Efficiency of Russian companies in call processing
How to determine which type of advertising is most effective
Not every internet marketer understands how important offline conversion (calls) analysis is to determine which advertising is more effective. This is not surprising: after all, the concept of "internet marketing effectiveness" is primarily associated with "online conversions" - that is, with what happens on the site, and not outside of it.
But ignoring "offline conversions" is unforgivable, because more than iran phone numbers half of the visitors to the average commercial site prefer to "convert" (make purchases, orders) by phone! And the percentage of such conversions, thanks to the widespread use of smartphones and the improvement of mobile search technologies, will only grow!
Average percentage of orders that website visitors place using a phone
Calls are the most important sales channel for any public company. More than half of the orders for the average company come by phone! But due to the inability to work with this channel, we often lose a lot in conversion - and we don’t even suspect it!
There are three factors to blame for this:
Lack of information about what advertising is most effective. Often we do not realize how important the telephone sales channel really is.
Misconceptions that the “telephone sales channel” is very difficult or even impossible to analyze and optimize.
It is not clear what and how to do. There is very little information about optimizing the "telephone sales channel" in the public domain. The usual tools of an Internet marketer (Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica) do not have the ability to analyze and optimize the "telephone sales channel".
Don't waste your advertising budget
The call tracking and end-to-end analytics service will show the effectiveness of each source in terms of “from click to sale”.
Get a consultation
The Importance of the Telephone Sales Channel
The lack of information about the importance of the telephone sales channel can be easily filled by answering the question: "Which advertising is more effective?", if we turn to the data of several studies recently conducted by several of the largest players in the Internet advertising market. These studies clearly show several modern trends related to the telephone sales channel:
1) More and more mobile devices - more and more calls:
64% of smartphone owners use their phones for online shopping;
55% of searches from smartphones end in conversion (a call, an order on the website, or a visit to an offline store);
visitors who access websites from mobile devices call almost twice as often as “regular” ones;
The volume of visits to websites from smartphones will exceed the volume of “regular” visitors in 2015.
2) Visitors want to call:
53% of shoppers cite lack of human interaction as the main reason for not shopping online;
63% of online shoppers research products on the website but place their orders over the phone.
3) The telephone sales channel has the highest conversion rate:
30% is the average conversion rate of a phone call into a customer;
61% of companies cite the telephone sales channel as “the highest quality and most important source of customers.”
It is obvious that people will continue to use mobile devices for web surfing, and the share of calls compared to other communication channels, including online orders, will continue to grow. Considering that the telephone channel is the highest quality and highly convertible (and this statement is the opinion of 2/3 of the representatives of the companies that took part in the survey), the analysis and increase of conversion of this channel should be the main task of Internet marketers. Do marketers understand this? And if they understand, what do they do to increase the effectiveness of the telephone sales channel?
Efficiency of Russian companies in call processing
The study, conducted jointly by UIS and CoMagic, aimed to collect information on how effectively Russian companies are able to "handle" their telephone sales channels. The study involved 1,000 companies from 8 different business sectors. All these companies placed ads in Yandex.Direct for queries related to their field of activity, with a cost of one click from $2 to $20. During the study, in order to identify the most effective advertising , 2 calls were made to each company (during the daytime and in the early evening) and several control questions were asked about the product or service offered by each specific company. The following results were obtained as a result of the study:
In 24% of companies, the call was not answered at all (they did not pick up the phone within 60 seconds or the signal was "busy" twice in a row). This figure shows that many Russian companies do not have a call service culture at all. Problems with "failed calls" or "busy" signals are easily solved with the help of modern "Virtual PBX" services , which allow flexible configuration of the call service scenario (for example, if the call center is overloaded, temporarily redirect calls to other departments of the company or redirect calls to the mobile phone of the duty officer if for some reason the phone is not picked up in the office).
Considering that the cost of one missed call due to advertising is approximately equal to the monthly cost of using the Virtual PBX service, such a large number of companies that are difficult to reach can only be explained by the lack of awareness among advertising companies about the capabilities of modern cloud PBXs.
When the phone was picked up, in 47% of cases the wait for the operator to answer took more than 20 seconds. According to a survey of online store visitors, 20 seconds is the critical mark, beyond which the visitor is usually not prepared to wait for an answer. And indeed, few visitors will patiently wait for an answer to a call for more than 20 seconds if there are always several competing sites at hand.
In 18% of the companies with which we spoke, we were unable to answer the question about the product/service offered and avoided the conversation under various pretexts. Among the most common responses were:
Call back later (in half an hour/hour/tomorrow) and you will receive an answer.
Leave your phone number and we will call you back.
We can't help you in any way / there's no one to consult.
All these answers, taking into account that the buyer wants to receive advice on the product/service “here and now” and does not intend to wait given the wide choice of competing suppliers, lead to only one thing – such companies lose customers.
In 55% of cases, when the conversation with the operator took place, it was noted that the company lacked any sales algorithm or conversation script (it was very easy to understand: any conversation script between a salesperson and a potential client begins with the introduction of the salesperson). The absence of a telephone conversation script as a sales algorithm leads to the fact that salespeople communicate with potential clients chaotically, “as God puts it into their hearts,” and this, naturally, leads to a significant decrease in the conversion of the telephone sales channel.
As a result, the researchers came to the conclusion that at the current moment, with more effective advertising, due to the lack of analysis and building an effective work of the telephone sales channel, the average company loses up to two orders out of three! Think about this figure: almost any company could easily increase the conversion of the telephone sales channel more than twice, having realized and started to solve the above problems!
But it turns out to be a vicious circle. Companies that do not monitor and analyze the effectiveness of advertising and the telephone sales channel simply do not have information that they have problems (and often about the enormous scale of these problems). In a false calm, such companies do not even try to use tools for analyzing the telephone sales channel, being sure that there are no problems (or completely overlooking the enormous importance of this channel, assessing the effectiveness of advertising types). But statistics stubbornly say the opposite!
[INSERT] From conversations with online store owners about the importance of the telephone sales channel:
"Answering calls is a pain in the ass! Now I have written on the website "Orders are accepted only through the website. Questions can be asked by email""
"They gave a 3% discount on orders placed on the website. Now they call and demand a discount over the phone, and if we ask to place an order on the website, they start to get indignant"
There is a solution!
And there really is a solution. But given that the above-described problem of increasing the effectiveness of advertising and the telephone sales channel is complex, the solution to this problem should also be complex, taking into account all possible reasons for the "conversion leak". Below are several standard and proven methods that will allow you to take full control of the telephone sales channel.