While your custom-designed website could be a major source of leads for your tree service business, you may also get a lot of business over the phone. Tracking what led a specific prospect to call you—whether it was a newspaper ad or an online Pay Per Click ad—helps you determine whether your marketing is producing results.
The problem, however, is that call tracking is not always easy. You have to remember to ask the tree service lead how he/she heard about your company—for most companies, this does not always happen.
In some cases, your leads may have seen your company in several locations before they decided to pick up their phone and call your service number. This means that when you ask where a lead heard about your company, their answer will depend on what they can remember, not the actual location that prompted them to call.
What this tells you is that asking a lead, “How did you hear about us?”, is not a very reliable method of tacking your tree service calls.
The best call tracking relies on good systems that are combined into software that delivers results. A good call tracking software helps you track which tree service marketing campaign led to the different phone calls your company gets. Without call tracking, it is hard to know whether spending $2,000 on that billboard advertisement was worth it.
In this detailed guide, Home Service Direct will take a deeper look at call tracking. We will help you understand why call tracking is important and also help you get the most out of it.
Why Track Calls: 7 Benefits of Call Tracking
1. You Make Data-Based Decisions
When your tree service company starts tracking calls, you will start making smarter decisions about the business.
To give you an example, it is not uncommon for tree care companies to spend a lot of money on offline marketing while assuming these campaigns are already producing maximum results. You could assume that an ad that cost you $10,000 drove a lot of business. However, when you assign a call tracking number to the ad campaign, it may turn out that the leads generated by the campaign are very low-quality.
If you discover that your lead closing rate is much lower for a specific campaign, switching to a different marketing method may help you 3X your tree service leads closing rate. Without call tracking, however, you may never know which marketing channel is working and which is not working.
2. You Get to Track Missed Calls
Another benefit call tracking brings is the ability to track missed calls. If your business currently has more than 5% missed calls, then this should let you know you lack ample phone coverage in your office.
Call tracking allows you to narrow down the missed-call data to the weekdays and times so that you can make more informed decisions regarding phone answering. For example, if you have been missing a large number of calls during lunch hour, then it might be a good idea to have your team stagger the lunch hour to ensure all calls are answered.
Similarly, if your business closes for the weekend, chances are, you have many missed calls on Saturday and Sunday. If your tree care company seems to be missing a large number of calls during the weekend, you might be able to close more tree care deals by paying someone to answer calls during the weekend.
3. Your Company Gets to Enjoy Whisper Messages
Simply defined, the term “whisper messages” refers to brief greetings that the person answering calls for your company gets before getting connected to the caller. For example, before getting collected to the lead, your customer service agent may hear “Call from Clipper Newspaper Ad.”
This message, although very simple, will allow your company’s team to tailor its approach so that it will have one less question to ask the new prospect.
4. Call Scoring
Some call tracking tools allow businesses to classify leads’ worth based on criteria specific to each tree care company. With call scoring, your company can easily determine whether a specific caller is a qualified lead or not. When you determine the caller is a qualified lead, you can easily pass him/her to the marketing team for lead nurturing.
5. Call Duration
Call tracking helps you understand which marketing methods result in longer and more in-depth calls. In most cases, longer and more in-depth calls result in higher conversion rates.
6. You Can Use Call Recordings to Better Understand Your Customers
Call tracking allows you to record calls. Listening to these recordings gives your company valuable information.
For example, you can discover the kind of problems that a large number of your clients are dealing with. This can help your company make the appropriate shifts in your operation plans to better serve the clients.
7. It Can Help You Refine Your SEO
Most tree service companies rely on either Pay Per Click (PPC) ads or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get their leads. You can use call tracking to collect information regarding your pay-per-click marketing—this will help you figure out which keywords are producing the most calls.
Armed with these keywords, you will have the ability to refine your tree service SEO. You will get to focus on keywords that are attracting leads and customers.
When Should You Invest in Call Tracking?
Your tree care company can track calls from the various tree service marketing methods that drive prospects/leads to call you. These marketing methods may include:
- Brochures
- Postcards
- Doorhangers
- Print magazine ads
- Paid digital advertising
- Social media
- Email marketing
Getting Started with Call Tracking: Let Home Service Direct Help You
Without a good call-tracking system, your business may not get the benefits we have mentioned in this guide. The easiest way to get started with high-quality call tracking is the Home Service Direct call tracking and recording system.
The Home Service Direct call-tracking and recording system carries a large number of benefits, including:
- Integration of your business phone number with Google analytics to ensure your business is getting real and actionable data.
- Setup and testing of all your phone numbers for your offline and online marketing channels. This ensures you are getting detailed reporting for all your marketing channels.
- Call tracking for individual web marketing channels—these include social media, pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), retargeting ads, etc.—coupled with detailed Return on Investment (ROI) reporting.
- A reporting interface that gives you access to monthly logs carrying phone call data. In addition to getting the caller’s phone number, you also get the caller’s location.
- Call recording so that you can get insights that let your company better serve its customers.