In an increasingly digital world, our focus is shifting more and more to online. Ecommerce has become par for the course for retailers as M commerce becomes the next big thing to crack. And there is certainly demand for it. An Ofcom survey in 2012 suggested that internet shopping was more popular in the UK than in any other major country, with Britons spending an average of £1,083 a year online. The study also found that in the UK, we also download more data on mobile devices than any other nation in the world. With all these compelling stats, surely it makes sense for all our efforts should be concentrated on online transactions?
However, the reality is that when we’re making a purchase, particularly something of high value, we usually want to talk to someone as part of the process. This reassures us that we’re dealing with a trustworthy organisation and gives us a chance to ask questions about the purchase. Research by Harris Interactive found that 54% of people want the reassurance of some human interaction before completing a purchase online – a figure that is no doubt higher for bigger ticket or complicated items, such as a holiday or an insurance policy.
It’s still true that people want to do business with people. And this is where marketers can come unstuck – if they forgot the value of the human voice in all this. We get caught up in analysing web traffic and number of clicks and assume that all our sales are coming from online, but what about the offline sales? What about the customer who’s browsed for a holiday, gone right through to the payment page but bought on the phone instead? Or what about the customer who browses, picks up the phone to ask a question but ultimately buys online?
Just because a sale happens offline, doesn’t mean that it can’t be analysed and linked to online activity. Technology exists that uses unique phone numbers to link up this on and offline activity. As a result, you can gain a huge amount of insight into their journey, including which keywords they searched to arrive at your site, which pages they browsed before picking up the phone, how long their call was and whether it resulted in a sale.
All this data can help marketers to further refine their digital marketing strategy by linking up online marketing spend with offline conversions that aren’t tracked by traditional analytics solutions. With this data, you might find that a key word performing poorly online is actually driving sales on the phone and, as a result, might be extremely valuable.
Digital marketers have long been tracking ROI on ad spend across online channels and have gained such valuable insights that this has now become the norm. If you apply these same analytics to phone calls, you might just uncover a whole cache of sales you never knew were happening.
By Mark Emmett, CIO at ResponseTap.
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