6 Ways to Encourage More Potential Customers to Call

Inbound sales calls are the lifeblood of many businesses and have been for years.

Consumers who call your business are up to ten times more likely to convert into a paying clientthan other lead generation sources (and it's a much easier conversation to have than calling cold!)

That being said, getting potential customers to pick up the phone isn't always easy. If it was, all of your competitors would be doing it, right? Knowing what engages your target audience and what drives them to move from intent to action can make all the difference between phones ringing off the hook and deadly silence on your sales floor.

Today, we'll examine six areas you can explore to send call volumes soaring and boost your bottom line.

Pick Up the Phone

Unlike website traffic or a social media follower, each and every customer call holds tremendous value. When someone picks up the phone to dial your digits, they send a clear signal that they're engaged with your business and need to know something about what you sell. This could be true of some other lead sources, but as many (or more) are just window shopping. That's rarely the case for callers.

In short, it pays to do all you can to prompt a potential customer to pick up the phone!

With your objective set to increase inbound call volume and an experienced sales team primed to convert those callers into customers, all you need now are the ideas to get people dialing your digits.

Here are six places you can start:

• 1. Focus on phone calls as your primary call-to-action
• 2. Invest more in click-to-call ad campaigns
• 3. Make your number easy to remember
• 4. Use online channels to drive offline calls
• 5. Align marketing campaigns with caller experience
• 6. Track existing calls more closely to see what works

Let's take a closer look at each of these and how you can turn them to your advantage.

Phone-Focused Calls to Action

We'll start with the simplest item (although it's not without its complications): to encourage more calls, you need to tell people to call you!

No, it's not rocket surgery, but making the conscious shift to focus on phone-based calls to action is important before you move on to more advanced initiatives. If you've been using mostly click-based calls to action - things like "Click here to learn more" and "Contact us online" - it can be jarring to move away from them.

To smooth that process, remind yourself and your marketing team that calls are more likely to convert into sales. They come from engaged prospects who are usually further down the funnel than those from other sources. That means not only that they're worth more, in most cases, but that your marketing and ad campaigns are likely to lead to impact the bottom line more quickly.

If that's not motivation enough to at least experiment with a shift in your calls to action, we don't know what is!

Click-to-Call Advertising

Online ads that promote phone calls have blossomed in the last year or two. Where once they were difficult to integrate into PPC ads or limited in functionality, there are now more click-to-call options than most marketers can wrap their heads around.

That's because the major online platforms - Google, Facebook, Twitter, and everyone on down - realize how attractive call options are to advertisers. Look no further than Google's recent mobile-first movement for proof.  

For your business, this means that there are more opportunities than ever to immediately boost calls from online sources. Some are more valuable than others, of course. A targeted Google search that leads to a call is more likely to yield results than a more general click from Twitter, for example. But the underlying concept remains the same, regardless of the source: if you get someone on the phone, it's easier to engage them and get them on board with what you offer.

Paying for those calls is less attractive than driving them organically, but if you need to boost calls quickly there are few better ways to accomplish it.

Get a More Memorable Number

As it's our business to make your contact number more memorable, we write about this topic all the time. We've told you about the versatility of vanity numbers and even the neuroscience behind a better number, so let's not get bogged down in detail here.

The simple truth is that there's no more affordable and immediate way to increase your call volume than making your contact number easier to remember. Take a quick look at our available numbers in any industry and we're sure you'll see something unforgettable after just a few clicks.

But we could talk to you about that all day, so let's move on to the next idea!

Online Marketing Drives Offline Calls

Once you have a memorable number and an ingenious ad campaign, the next step is to get it out into the world and working for your business. While that still means physical spaces like billboards and transport ads, it's also important not to ignore the online opportunities to make more of your number and boost inbound calls.

Include your number in search ads (see above), social media listings, banner ads, infographics, and even offbeat areas like fun visual memes posted to social networks. You never know which promotion or post will take off, so having your number span the range of your content keeps it in front of people and ensures they always have a way to get in touch with you.

One area that concerns some business owners is that driving phone calls from online ad channels causes a gap in analytics. This issue is rapidly being addressed by most online ad providers, but anyone who has a custom number can already take advantage of the call tracking advantages it offers. You can also use multiple numbers to measure several different campaigns running at the same time, or even within the same campaign to monitor the effectiveness of different marketing channels.

The important element here is that online marketing can no longer be seen as a separate entity to campaigns running in real-world media like print, radio, and direct mail marketing.

The two increasingly compliment each other and will become inextricably linked in the next few years. If pays to learn the most effective mix for your business now, before that happens, and benefit from the increased call volume that results before your competitors jump on the bandwagon.

Align Your Customer's Experience

This one is more about refining the experience for your existing callers, which you will quickly see benefits your business through increased brand reputation and word-of-mouth referrals.

A universal experience for all customers would make your marketing department's life much easier, but it's rarely the reality. Furthermore, it's not really the most effective way to optimize conversions for your sales team.

This is because different ads and promotional content reach varied audiences and emphasize different elements of your business. Your sales team need to know where a caller has come from and why they've been inspired to place the call. This helps them to prepare for the context of the conversation ahead, put themselves in the place of the caller and results in far more conversions because of it.

Customer personas, target audiences, and training to keep you sales and marketing teams on the same page can all help to this end and will improve your callers' experience immeasurably in the long-term.

Take Advantage of Call Tracking Data

As we touched upon above, when you use a vanity number - or numbers - you have access to a wealth of data about your callers. When you want to increase your call volume, this information becomes invaluable.

In a sense, this is the tip that ties all of the others together. Gaining access to call data

Gaining access to call data makes the call source visible, and eventually allows you to assign a dollar value to every call. Once you have enough data gathered, that's the kind of information that helps you to make better decisions about where to allocate your advertising dollars to further boost call volume. There's no substitute for data-driven decisions, especially when it comes to allocating that all-important marketing budget for the year ahead.

This data is also important because it lets other departments and partner organizations see what's happening with your sales calls. Sharing performance data lets everyone see the marketing platforms and tactics that are delivering results, which feeds back to aligning experience.

Get everyone on the same page about the marketing messages that are out there and how callers vary by channel and your business will make much more of the increased call volume coming its way!

To access the advantages of memorable contact details and call tracking technology, find a vanity number for your business today.