Track Advertising with an 800 Number

One of the biggest expenses for any successful business is advertising.  Generally this is accomplished through various marketing mediums such as direct mail, print mediums (such as newspapers or magazines etc.), internet marketing and other means.  All of these methods are designed to create interest in your product or service and generate some type of response and to effectively protect this investment an effective method to track advertising efforts must be employed. 

Typically these responses fall into one of four categories. 

1.    Immediate customer acquisition as the effort results in a purchase.  Of course this is always the most desirable result.  When most companies track advertising this result is what they focus on.

2.   Additional interest that may lead the prospect to further investigate your offering.  This can include visiting your website, reading your company literature or asking others if they have ever purchased from your company.  It is difficult to track advertising that produces this result because there is no way for you to know that your prospect has elevated interest. 

3.   Your prospect contacts you via email or from a response form on your website.  These leads are of varying quality ranging from highly qualified to poor quality leads that are tire kickers or even at times just competitors checking out your business.

4.   Your prospect contacts you via phone.  Of all the alternatives other then people who simply purchase your product or services this one is always the most qualified type of lead you can receive.  Prospects who pick up the phone and call you have clearly demonstrated a serious level of interest and want to know more about what you have to offer.

Given that having every prospect simply buy from you is desirable but not realistic your focus should be to insure any interested party who does not buy immediately is led to contact you via phone with every marketing effort.  Your prospects should be encouraged to call you in every news paper ad, every page of your website, in any radio or television commercial, in all direct mail and in anything you use to promote your business.  Additionally since prospects who call you represent the most highly qualified prospects you generate with your marketing efforts you should employ some method to track advertising that generates this type of response.

One very inexpensive thing any company can do to increase the number of telephone inquires to their marketing efforts and to track advertising at the same time is to utilize an 800 toll free number.  Often I hear clients state that an 800 number is expensive.  I generally then ask them if they would call a prospect long-distance if they knew where the prospect was but had to make a long-distance call to reach them.  The answer is always yes if the client has any understanding of the value of a customer.  I then ask, given that, that is the case does it not make sense to pay for the same call when the prospect is motivated enough to call you?  In most cases it then becomes clear to the client how cost effective a standard 800 number is.

So if an 800 number can increase the number of prospects that call you in response to your marketing efforts wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to accurately track advertising efforts that produced this result for you? Fortunately there is and the service is called Kall8.

Using Kall8 numbers to track advertising is remarkably simple to do and very inexpensive as well.  To do this you simply set up a different number for each major marketing initiative and Kall8 will track advertising efforts that result in incoming calls for you.  Again this is often perceived as being expensive but the cost to maintain each number is only 2 dollars a month.  If you are using an 800 number the total incoming call charge is the same for 10 numbers as it would be for one number.  What I mean by this is 500 minutes of incoming calls is 500 minutes regardless of how many numbers you receive the calls on when using this service.

Once you have the numbers set up you simply use one to track advertising responses for each marketing effort.  Kall8 provides all clients with a free online web-reporting center to track advertising efforts with extreme ease.  This reporting captures caller ID information from every call that comes in and tracks which of your 800 stand-alone numbers the calls came in on.  Further by simply entering a monthly cost for each marketing effort Kall8 will provide you with on going calculations of your cost per response.  To make this a bit more clear I will give an example using actual numbers from a recent clients efforts. 

Our client was using 5 primary means of marketing.

The client was advised to set up 5 Kall8 numbers to track advertising efforts.  The cost was 2 dollars per number and about 42 dollars in incoming usage for about 600 minutes in incoming calls for a total cost of 52 dollars a month.  Here is a summary of the results when the client used Kall8 to track advertising efforts.

When the client used this service to track advertising they were given some very effective information. 

1.   Based on the value of a new customer even the poor performing advertising was profitable.

2.    The advertising on Radio Station A was far more effective then Radio Station B

3.   The 600 dollars spent on direct mail and Radio Station B was being poorly invested even though profitable it was more then three times as expensive per response as the more effective efforts were.

4.   While the website cost per response was very good, based on the number of visitors the site was receiving every month (close to 1000 unique visits were being logged by the clients website tracking software) the number of calls seemed somewhat low. 

The client made the following adjustments.

1.   The direct mail campaign was dropped in its place ads were placed in a similar newspaper to the effective one with 300 dollars of the 600 saved.  Result was more effective marketing and 300 net dollars saved

2.   The advertising on Station B was dropped and the spots on Station A were doubled.  The client got a discount on the additional slots raising their cost on Station A to $2600 the total cost of Radio advertising down from $3200 a month to $2600 saving the client over $600 dollars a month.

3.   The website was evaluated and it was deemed that not enough was being done to get site visitors to call the client.  A statement encouraging visitors to call the company was added to all the sites major pages.  This increased calls coming in from web site visitors from 6 to more then 30 in the fist month after the change.

The ultimate result was an increase from 133 calls a month to over 170 inbound calls with a reduction in total gross advertising costs of $600 a month.  The client is currently researching other advertising options and as they are implemented by using a Kall8 number to track advertising the client will insure the money is being well spent and be able to adjust accordingly.

Additionally as the calls are tracked the caller ID Information for each call that was received is captured online so our client is growing his database of customers and prospects in a very passive manner.  Not bad for a 50 dollar investment indeed it is quite clear that the service paid for itself even with more then ten hours in inbound calling usage.

If you would like to learn more about how you can use this service to track advertising efforts for your business just give us a call toll free of course at 866-994-1212 or send us your questions by email and we will be happy to help you.

For more information on Kall8 visit our section on Ad Tracking and take a free tour of Kall8’s features with our Online Flash Demo.

 If you want to set up a Kall8 Account just Click Here